Legally compliant e-mail archiving in companies (1/2)
A large share of modern corporate communication and business processes takes place via email correspondence. Even companies that are not fully paperless must address legally compliant email archiving and long-term archiving. In practice, this requires a professional software solution and a structured archiving concept.
Why is email archiving required?
Every company has legal transparency obligations. Some emails (not necessarily all) must be archived for tax and compliance reasons so that business processes remain traceable over time. In general, all emails relevant to business transactions (including complaints) must be archived, including sent emails and their attachments.
Important:
For data protection reasons (GDPR), private email communication and certain confidential communication, for example with works councils or company physicians, must not be archived. Companies therefore need clear internal policies for private email use.
Professional email archiving is part of a robust data protection strategy. Companies must be able to provide information about stored personal data on request. This requires software that supports searchable and exportable archives for emails and attachments.
What is not considered legally compliant archiving?
- Printed copies of emails (not original data)
- Pure email backups (backup is not archive)
- Local mailbox archive features alone
- Simple forwarding/moving into an archive mailbox
What makes email archiving legally compliant?
Archived emails must be:
- audit-proof
- complete (including attachments)
- available and retrievable at all times
- tamper-proof
- machine-readable
Storage can be on internal servers or external media, as long as all requirements are fulfilled.
Which emails must be archived, and for how long?
Typical retention periods in Germany are 6 years, and 10 years for invoices, accounting records, and related financial documents. In practice, many organizations retain all business emails for 10 years to simplify compliance.
What should a good archiving solution provide?
- easy setup
- low operational overhead
- support for archiving existing legacy emails
- user-friendly handling and adaptability to different email systems
A strong archive solution should transfer relevant emails into a standardized long-term format that remains readable and traceable over time. PDF and PDF/A are commonly recommended for this purpose.
In part 2, we focus specifically on email archiving with webPDF and provide additional legal references.