The Pöschl Tobacco Group is the world's largest producer of snuff tobacco and Germany's leading independent tobacco manufacturer. A fourth-generation family business, Pöschl posted annual revenue of over €790 million in 2024. Roughly 400 employees work at its headquarters in Geisenhausen, Bavaria.

Email is the lifeblood of the company's sales operations. But as mailboxes grew larger and harder to manage, with some ballooning to 50 GB, the company had no way to archive email communication in a manner that was legally defensible and audit-ready. With an ISO 27001 certification also on the horizon, IT leadership decided it was time to invest in a professional email archiving solution. Patrick Leipold, IT Systems Administrator at Pöschl Tobacco, points to benefits that go well beyond compliance:

EMA's full-text indexing makes search incredibly powerful — especially because it scans attachments, too. An employee can type a part number into the search bar and find it inside a PDF that was attached to an offer sent months ago. Our experience has been simple: if you remember anything at all about the email you're looking for, EMA will find it.

Compliant, Audit-Ready Email Archiving

After evaluating several options, Pöschl selected EMA from ARTEC IT Solutions. Following a pilot phase and guidance from ARTEC partner Advanced UniByte, the solution was deployed on-premises — a deliberate choice, given that Pöschl operates two of its own data centers. All inbound and outbound email is now archived automatically and in full compliance with applicable regulations. To safeguard data privacy, access to sensitive messages requires dual authorization, with the works council automatically involved in the approval process.

Beyond regulatory compliance, the solution has delivered clear productivity gains. Employees at Pöschl access the archive through a simple browser link, another intentional design decision by the company. This means users can search the archive in one window while still navigating folder structures in their regular email client, side by side.

A Lighter Load for IT

The rollout of EMA has also taken meaningful pressure off Pöschl's roughly 20-person IT team. Previously, when employees accidentally moved or deleted emails, IT staff had to recover them manually; a process that could be time-consuming and, for older messages, might require restoring tape backups. Now, employees can retrieve those emails on their own in seconds.

Looking ahead, Pöschl plans to deploy a second EMA appliance as a hot standby. If one data center experiences a temporary outage, the system can fail over to the second unit, ensuring high availability.