Our answers at a glance
Benno MailArchiv – Frequently Asked Questions
System requirements
- Operation on hardware or virtualized possible (VMware, Proxmox, KVM, XEN, HyperV, …)
- Operation in containers (e.g. Docker) possible
- CPU and RAM:
- up to approx. 100 mailboxes: 1 CPU core; 2-4 GB RAM
- up to approx. 500 mailboxes: 1-2 CPU cores; 4-8 GB RAM
- up to approx. 1,000 mailboxes: 2 CPU cores; 8-16 GB RAM
- up to approx. 5,000 mailboxes: 2-4 CPU cores; 16-32 GB RAM
- Mass storage:
- Operating system and search index: SSDs
- Archive storage space: slow hard disks, NAS systems, … (size as needed)
- Enterprise Edition & Hosting Edition: Amazon S3 and compatible storage systems as storage possible
- Performance of a server instance: A maximum of approximately 2,500 tenants with (theoretically) any number of mailboxes can be mapped per instance
- All emails are stored gzip-compressed (and optionally AES-256 encrypted)
- Good compression rates are achieved with text and HTML
- JPEG photos, MPEG videos or other pre-compressed formats (attachments) accordingly achieve lower compression rates
- The size of the search index is approximately around 8-12% of the size of the archive
Compatibility & Functionality
Yes, Benno MailArchiv is virtually compatible with all mail and groupware solutions. Since Benno MailArchiv uses and supports open standards and open interfaces, integration with various mail solutions is easy to implement.
To archive emails from MS Exchange, the 'Journaling Mailbox' functionality must be configured on the Exchange Server. This collects (depending on the configuration) all incoming and outgoing as well as internally sent emails in a collective mailbox, the so-called 'Journaling Mailbox'. Benno MailArchiv retrieves all emails to be archived from the Journaling Mailbox via the Benno Exchange Connector and archives them automatically.
Of course, Benno MailArchiv supports Exchange Online mailboxes (or Microsoft 365).
The Journaling Mailbox, which must be set up on the customer side in Exchange Online, must not be an Exchange Online mailbox according to the Microsoft Terms and Conditions. That is, a mailbox outside of Exchange Online must be set up, which is used as a journal mailbox.
We provide all Benno Cloud Enterprise customers for Office 365 / Exchange Online with a custom journal mailbox free of charge.
Although Exchange Online offers a simple mail archiving function, Benno MailArchiv is the optimal complement to Office 365 / Exchange Online, because Benno MailArchiv / Benno Cloud offers more than just storing emails: With the integrated full-text search, any email can be found and displayed in seconds.
E-mail search and research
We have summarized the diverse search options of Benno MailArchiv in the tutorial "Finding emails quickly and easily with Benno MailArchiv 2.0".
The tutorial can be downloaded here.
Of course. However, the detailed documentation on the syntax is currently only available in English.
We use Apache Lucene for indexing and making emails searchable. Apache Lucene is also used by Wikipedia for indexing and searching wiki articles.
A detailed documentation on the syntax of Lucene (and thus Benno MailArchiv) can be found here:
http://lucene.apache.org/core/3_5_0/queryparsersyntax.html
A German syntax description (without claim to completeness) can be found here:
http://www.fh-wedel.de/~si/seminare/ws02/Ausarbeitung/e.lucene/2.html
Administration and Rights Management
Benno MailArchiv has both an AD connector and an LDAP connector. Both are included in the license scope.
Compliance and Legal Aspects
Benno MailArchiv meets the requirements of the GoBD. (The GoBD replaces the GDPdU and GoBS, which were valid until the end of 2014.)
However, using Benno MailArchiv as a software solution for mail archiving alone does not automatically and necessarily lead to GoBD-compliant mail archiving: According to the GoBD, the taxpayer is obliged to create a process documentation on the archiving of tax and commercial law relevant emails. In addition to the technical context, this also includes describing the organizational aspects of mail archiving.
Note: A mail archiving solution (software) alone is never suitable for establishing GoBD-compliant mail archiving. It is fundamentally always necessary to document the application environment in which the mail archiving takes place.
Note: The existence of any certificate or test that allegedly confirms the software is GoBD-compliant does not result in GoBD-compliant mail archiving, as it (according to the wording of the GoBD) “has no binding effect on the tax authority” (see GoBD, Chapter 12 (Certification and Software Testimonials), Paragraph 181). They are legally ineffective and at best misleading marketing speak.
Further details on this are explained in the section “How is legally compliant mail archiving ensured according to GoBD?”.
Benno MailArchiv initially has the technical property that a SHA-256 checksum is generated and journaled for every archived e-mail. Based on the checksum information, the consistency of each individual e-mail or the entire archive can be checked and verified at any time.
The authenticity of an email is checked on the fly in the web app for each displayed email and the result is displayed in the form of a green notice or red warning triangle.
To achieve legally compliant email archiving, in addition to the pure software for email archiving, "Orgware" is also required. GoBD-compliant email archiving cannot be implemented solely through technical components, but must be flanked by organizational measures. Therefore, after the technical implementation of Benno MailArchiv, a suitable procedural documentation must be created to document the orderliness of the procedure. All essential aspects of the installation must be described and documented in it. (See also the section "Is Benno MailArchiv GoBD-compliant?").
To the extent that we are commissioned to create the procedural documentation, we base our creation on relevant recommendations and audit and certification standards of various associations as well as the Institute of Public Auditors in Germany e.V. (IDW), so that the independent verifiability of the Benno MailArchiv installation is ensured at all times based on the procedural documentation.
Further information on compliant email archiving and on the topic of process documentation can be found here in this white paper.
Actual duplicates, i.e. byte-identical emails, are not accepted by Benno MailArchiv in the first place and are therefore also logged in the journal. This covers most cases, such as Cc and Bcc emails, provided that the forwarding mail server is configured correctly.
A heuristic duplicate search, on the other hand, would be problematic because it is not transparent to the user and also represents a potential source of error.
The principle is: "Better to archive too much than too little".
No data is automatically deleted after 10 years.
According to current legal requirements, emails can be deleted after 6 or 10 years from a commercial or tax law perspective. Automatic deletion does not occur.
Benno MailArchiv manages the archived emails in archive areas with configurable time division (e.g. monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.). Emails can be removed from the archive by administrators according to expired deadlines and per time period.
From the perspective of compliance, however, the "permanent" storage of emails can be more sensible than deleting them after the expiry of deadlines: Although the statutory retention periods permit the destruction of information after their expiry, it may be sensible or necessary for reasons of traceability, documentation, clarification of responsibility, etc., not to delete the emails.
In this context, we are aware of compliance requirements from customers who even archive spam in order to definitively and guaranteedly track when which email arrived or to rule out that any email is not available or findable.
Regulations of this kind are related to the company's own corporate policy and existing compliance requirements in the sense of corporate governance.
To what extent data protection aspects are affected (GDPR) and whether any deviating measures are required is the taxpayer's responsibility to check. Benno MailArchiv does not present a barrier here, but rather fulfills the statutory requirements.
No. Although it would be technically possible without any problems, it is not GoBD-compliant. We gladly offer users of such mailboxes a move to LWsystems Cloud. In LWsystems Cloud, you can use the Zimbra groupware and choose between mailboxes of any size - from simple IMAP mailboxes with web mail to entire groupware mailboxes. You can of course also use these with Microsoft Outlook.
You can find further details on hosted Zimbra mailboxes here
Questions about Open Benno MailArchiv
Open Benno MailArchiv is the community edition of Benno MailArchiv. Open Benno MailArchiv (short "Open Benno") can be used free of charge in private environments. The source code of "Open Benno" is available for download on the internet. Open Benno differs in several points from Benno MailArchiv (see next question).
Benno MailArchiv is the manufacturer-maintained and supported software for use in companies and institutions of all kinds.
Benno MailArchiv is available on the basis of a chargeable software maintenance subscription. This subscription ensures product maintenance, further development and the possibility of claiming support from us as the manufacturer.
Benno MailArchive and 'Open Benno' differ in some technical and legal points: Thus, the commercial or business use of 'Open Benno' is, for example, a violation of the software license under which the Benno MailArchive WebApp is available.
Open Benno MailArchive ('Open Benno') and Benno MailArchive differ from each other in the following points:
- no license key is required
- there are no user permissions (every user can view all e-mails)
- the delivery of the package benno-rest is done as a binary package
- there are no performance optimizations for the search
We are deeply convinced that software thrives better in an open environment and achieves higher quality than closed software, where the user is at the mercy of the manufacturer's promises. The openness leads to a number of benefits for the user:
- The software can be reviewed by third parties at any time, independent of the manufacturer.
- Mail archiving leads to the creation of long-term data silos. To prevent these from becoming data graveyards, absolute openness is an important prerequisite.
- The user is never in a "vendor lock-in", i.e. the user has the security that switching to another mail archiving system is possible at any time in the simplest way (should the user wish to do so).
- For the “worst case” scenario, a 100% data-compatible software version is available with Open Benno MailArchiv. Data graveyards are fundamentally excluded by their nature. In addition, this ensures that in an emergency, all archived emails are fully readable and usable, independent of the provider and technology, at any time.
Yes. The two versions are and remain permanently data-compatible. A switch is possible in both directions. It should be noted that a GoBD-compliant archiving of commercial and tax-related emails with Open Benno is not only not possible under licensing law, but is fundamentally excluded.