Outlook on a PC uses a giant PST file to store local copies of emails, or an OST file to store pointers to the emails online.

Outlook on a Mac appears to store every email as a separate file within a massive folder tree under Documents \ Microsoft User Data \ Office 2011 Identities \ <name> \ Data Records \ Messages. And any attachments are separate under the ...\ Message Attachments folder.

So here's my problem: my company uses remote Exchange for our email. In addition to my personal email account, I also have access to the "Support" email account, where we store every support email we receive, using separate folders for each customer. Over the years, this repository has grown to over 300,000 files! It's huge and slow keeping everything synchronized. (For potential liability reasons, we need to keep every email.)

I don't need immediate, live access to all these emails. But occasionally, I need to go into a specific folder to find a specific email from a few months ago.

Does Outlook 2011 on the Mac have the ability to NOT store all these emails locally? I want local storage for my personal account which is far more manageable. But for the "Support" account, I'd be very happy to keep these emails on the remote server and accept a little delay for the occasional times when I need to access a specific folder (we have a good fast 'net connection.) And my hard disk, which is bursting at the seams, would also be grateful!

I've looked at the account level options and didn't see anything. So I thought I'd ask.

Dan