Cryoserver email archiving: keep, find, prove

What Swiss law requires

The Code of Obligations requires books and accounting records to be kept for 10 years from the end of the financial year (art. 958f CO). A message confirming an order, sending an invoice or amending a contract is a supporting document. The VAT Act also provides for 10 years, and 20 years for documents relating to real estate (art. 70 para. 3 VAT Act). These texts are published on fedlex.admin.ch, the official collection of federal law.

How the archive proves an email is authentic

When a message reaches the archive, it gets a digital fingerprint, stored with it in encrypted form. When you open it, the fingerprint is recalculated and compared with the original: if they match, the message has not been touched. This is what the Ordinance on the keeping and retention of accounts (GeBüV/Olico, art. 3) requires: no change may go unnoticed.

Who can access the archive?

Each user sees their own emails. Wider access, for example for management, accounting or an audit, is granted by role to people you appoint. Every access is logged, as the ordinance requires (art. 8).

Archive, backup or mailbox: what is the difference?

The mailbox is for working: you sort and delete. A backup takes a snapshot of a system to restore it after a failure. The archive keeps each message exactly as it was sent or received, for the whole legal period, and makes it searchable in seconds. In a dispute or a tax audit, the archive is what counts.

What about your old emails?

Your old archives and PST files can be imported and indexed with a tool included in the offer: each user or your administrator takes care of it. Duplicates are removed and data is compressed: according to the vendor, the archive often takes 30 to 40% less space than the original messages.

A clear retention policy

Keeping all emails for 10 years is allowed if the company justifies it with a written retention policy: the Data Protection Act (FADP) asks not to keep personal data without a reason. For employees' private emails, set up an email use policy: in Switzerland, employers must respect their employees' personality (art. 328 and 328b CO).

Cryoserver, the vendor

Cryoserver is a solution dedicated to email archiving, used by more than 3,500 organisations, from public administrations to law firms and financial companies. According to the vendor, it archives 200 messages per second and answers most searches in one to two seconds. It works with Microsoft 365 and Exchange.