Email Archiving for SMBs: A Real-World Engineering Firm Example

For mid-sized companies, email archiving is not an abstract compliance topic. It is a tool that solves concrete everyday problems: disputes with clients, knowledge loss when employees leave, GDPR subject access requests, and of course tax audits. This article uses an engineering firm as a practical example.

Mueller & Partners, Structural Engineering Firm

Mueller & Partners is a structural engineering firm in Stuttgart, Germany, with 25 employees. The team works on projects for property developers, architects, and public sector clients. Each project generates hundreds of emails: structural calculations, plan approvals, change orders, defect reports. Many emails contain large attachments — PDF plans, CAD exports, photo documentation.

The firm uses Microsoft 365 but has no systematic archiving. Emails sit in individual Outlook mailboxes. When an employee leaves, their mailbox is deleted after six months. Knowledge is lost.

Starting Point

Management chooses the Business plan on EasyMailArchive — for Legal Hold, priority support, and 25 GB storage per license.

Month 1: Setup and Migration

Setup takes half a day. SMTP forwarding is configured, existing emails are imported via IMAP. After 48 hours, the entire historical email volume is searchable.

With 320 GB of storage and 625 GB of quota, there are no storage concerns. The license count simply equals the employee count.

Month 6: Project Dispute with Developer

A property developer claims cracks in a parking structure and alleges the engineering firm dimensioned the reinforcement incorrectly. The demand: EUR 280,000 in damages. The developer presents emails in which the firm supposedly agreed to a modified design.

Management searches the archive for the complete email history of the project — chronological, complete, with all attachments. Within an hour, the entire correspondence is available. Result: the firm had explicitly flagged a necessary design change. The developer had ignored the warning and independently used a cheaper construction method. The warning email is in the archive, stored in an unalterable state.

The dispute is settled. Without the archive, the firm would have struggled to assemble the complete correspondence from individual Outlook mailboxes — especially since the project manager in charge had since left the company.

Month 14: Employee Resignation

An experienced project manager resigns and joins a competitor. Her Outlook mailbox contained five years of project communication with key clients.

Previously, the firm would have had six months after her departure to manually save relevant emails — a process nobody actually carries out in practice. With the archive, all communication is automatically preserved. Her successor can trace the full project history without gaps.

At the same time, management activates Legal Hold on the archived mailbox. This ensures no retention policy deletes the emails prematurely while open projects are still running.

The license is removed after the employee leaves. The archived emails remain — under Legal Hold, indefinitely.

Month 20: GDPR Subject Access Request

A former job applicant submits a subject access request under Article 15 GDPR: they want to know what personal data the firm holds about them, including email communication.

Without an archive, the firm would need to manually search every individual mailbox — including those of employees who are unaware of the request and may be on holiday. With the archive, a single search for the applicant's name and email address is enough. Within minutes, the complete correspondence is ready for export.

Year 3: Growth

The firm grows to 35 employees. More projects mean more emails and more storage.

Year 3: When Storage Determines the License Count

An alternative scenario to illustrate: suppose the firm had particularly large attachments and storage usage was 1,000 GB instead of 580 GB.

In this case, storage usage exceeds the quota. The license count is automatically raised to 40. The additional 5 licenses cover the 125 GB of excess storage.

Total Cost Over Three Years

On the annual plan (20% discount): EUR 7,258 instead of EUR 9,072.

Against that: a EUR 280,000 damages claim deflected, seamless project handovers during staff turnover, and GDPR-compliant responses within minutes.

Why Business Instead of Starter?

For a firm of this size, the Business plan is the right choice:

Legal Hold alone justifies the price difference. When project volumes run into millions of euros per year, the ability to protect specific emails from deletion is not a nice-to-have — it is a necessity.

Conclusion

For mid-sized companies, email archiving is an operational tool that proves its worth in everyday work — not just during audits, but in project disputes, staff transitions, and data protection requests. The costs are minimal compared to the risks of operating without it.

An engineering firm with 25 to 35 employees pays between EUR 216 and EUR 315 per month. In return, all business communication is protected, searchable, and provable at any time.

Image: This_is_Engineering via Pixabay