Legally compliant e-mail archiving for SMEs and freelancers - unfortunately often deficient in practice

A survey by YouGov revealed that three out of four small businesses know nothing about legally compliant email archiving and 73% of employees are unaware of the legal requirements for email archiving. In some cases, companies have a very pragmatic approach to older e-mails. For example, emails remain in the mailbox without being archived, and some are simply deleted after a certain period of time. Source

This is not without problems. The GoBD (principles for the proper keeping and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form as well as for data access) has regulated legally compliant email archiving since January 1, 2015. It is therefore high time that even smaller companies deal with this legal requirement and implement archiving accordingly. It is important to know that inadequate or missing archiving is basically equivalent to non-compliance with the accounting obligation. And that can lead to severe penalties and restrictions.

What does legally compliant e-mail archiving according to GoBD actually mean?

Electronic archiving must enable a quick overview, the archived data must be identical to the original and tamper-proof, and it must also be available within the retention period and be machine-readable. At first glance, this all sounds rather complicated, but there are already good solutions available that take care of this archiving for companies and employees without them even noticing. We have compiled a clear overview of the legal requirements and deadlines that must be observed when archiving e-mails in our white paper.