Pöschl Tobacco Group enhances email archiving with ARTEC EMA

Pöschl Tobacco Group, the world's largest producer of snuff and Germany's leading independent tobacco manufacturer, has implemented ARTEC IT Solutions' EMA email archiving system. The goal is to ensure legally compliant and audit-proof archiving of email communications, while simultaneously improving day-to-day performance.

The company's communication, particularly within the sales team, relies heavily on email. With mailboxes growing to up to 50 GB without a reliable archiving method, the company decided to invest in a professional solution. Patrick Leipold, IT Systems Administrator at Pöschl Tabak, highlights the benefits of EMA: "EMA's full-text indexing delivers an incredibly powerful search – especially because attachments are scanned too. Staff can, for instance, search for an article number from a quote that happens to appear in an attached PDF." He adds that EMA will find the email if the user can remember anything about it.

After evaluating several options, Pöschl chose ARTEC IT Solutions' EMA. The solution was deployed on-premises, as the company operates two data centers. All inbound and outbound emails are archived automatically and in full legal compliance. To ensure data protection, a four-eyes principle applies for sensitive access cases, meaning the works council is automatically involved.

Beyond regulatory compliance, the solution has delivered clear performance gains in everyday work. Staff access the archive via a browser link, a deliberate choice by the company. This allows anyone searching for a specific email to run an archive search while keeping their folder structure in their email client visible. This has also significantly eased the IT department's workload, as employees can now restore accidentally moved or deleted emails from the archive themselves without IT staff assistance.

As a next step, the company plans to deploy a second EMA appliance as a hot standby to ensure high availability in the event of potential data center outages. The solution includes the EMA Enterprise Premium model and the EMA Email module, along with VSTOR Vault Direct Attached Storage.