barackrocksall, (BTW -love the name)

Outlook can do what you are hoping for as long as the e-mail files you are taking from webmail are exported as PST files. PST files are stored locally, so if you want all old email in a pst file, you can take it with you if you like (I'd keep a copy on your machine as well as an external drive if you travel a lot).

If your company is using Outlook and switching to another host, you might want to look into hosted Exchange for your email account because you are mobile. If you do this the best thing to do would be to import the PST file so that all your old e-mail is on your Outlook client, then it gets sycned to the Exchange server. What that means is that you would be able to access all your email, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes at multiple locations and it's the same everywhere...including a mobile device. I use The Message Center because they are inexpensive and they have great customer support. They held my hand and made switching from a pop to exchange easy. I didn't know anything about PST files until I started using their service.

POP access would only allow you to view the current mail pulled on your outlook client when you open it. The cool thing about Exchange is you would still have web access as well if you're somewhere that there is an internet connection, but you don't have Outlook.

But to answer your question Outlook is capable of allowing you to view your archived email in a separate file.

Hope this is helpful to you!

Masta7Mail
seamlessly connected via hosted Exchange with http://www.themessagecenter.com