Email Archiving Cost

Every German business has to keep business email, and the cost question is not whether to archive but how. The main options are a purchased licence you run yourself, features inside your mail system, and a cloud archive billed per mailbox.

Legal basis

The duty to retain applies to every business, whatever its size:

• § 257 HGB (Commercial Code) requires merchants to keep received business letters (Handelsbriefe) and copies of those they send.
• § 147 AO (Fiscal Code) extends this to all tax-relevant documents.
• GoBD are the tax authority's rules for keeping electronic books and records. They expect records to be complete, unalterable and readable throughout the retention period.

The periods are 6 years for business letters, 8 years for accounting vouchers including invoices, and 10 years for books, annual financial statements and organisational documents. The 8-year period applies since 1 January 2025 under the Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act (BEG IV). It covers all documents whose old 10-year period had not ended by 31 December 2024 (Art. 97 § 19a EGAO). Banks, insurers and investment firms follow one year later. The period starts at the end of the calendar year.

Emails can be business letters. The Federal Fiscal Court confirmed this in its order XI R 15/23 of 30 April 2025. You therefore pay for archiving over many years, not for a single year. Under § 146 (2a) AO, electronic records may also be kept in another EU member state, so a provider in Germany is not a legal requirement, but it makes the question of where your data sits easy to answer.

The problem: three pricing models and hidden costs

The costs that are easy to miss:

• Operation. A self-hosted archive needs updates, monitoring and storage expansion over 10 years.
• Backup. The archive itself must be backed up, ideally at a second location.
• Licence upgrade. Archiving features in Microsoft 365 often require higher plans, for every user and not only for those you want to archive.
• Switching. When the mail system or the archive product ends, 10 years of email have to move.

Prices and a worked example with EasyMailArchive

Prices are per licence, excluding VAT, from one user. See the full details on the pricing page.

Worked example: an engineering office with 10 mailboxes pays 40 EUR per month or 380 EUR per year on Starter. That covers capture by BCC or IMAP, AES-256 encryption with a separate key per customer, hosting in the WITT AG data centre in Germany, search, the audit log and export. There is no server and no maintenance contract to pay for.

Every plan includes:

• Capture through a BCC or journal rule from Microsoft 365, Exchange 2013 and later, Google Workspace and Postfix, or IMAP import of any mailbox, including Sent
• Import of existing mail over IMAP, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace
• Retention rules per organisation, domain or mailbox, up to 10 years on Starter and Business, with automatic deletion only when the period ends
• Full-text search and saved searches
• Export as original EML, or as PDF with SHA-256 checksums
• An audit log of every action, exportable as CSV
• Roles for admin, auditor and user, SSO through OIDC (Microsoft Entra ID, Google, Okta) and TOTP two-factor login

Business adds legal hold.

How to get started

1. Create an account. The trial is free for 30 days, no credit card.
2. Set up the BCC rule following the journaling guide, or connect a mailbox over IMAP as described in the IMAP integration guide.
3. Import your existing mail, then choose a plan after the trial.

Read more

• Email archive in the cloud, hosted in Germany
• GoBD email archiving
• Who must archive email in Germany

See pricing or try it free for 30 days.

This article summarises the law in general terms and is not legal or tax advice.