Documentation

Compliance and eDiscovery

AnnexGroup provides server-side compliance functions for everyday administration: litigation holds, eDiscovery search, journaling and DLP templates.

Litigation hold / legal hold

A litigation hold prevents messages in certain mailboxes from being deleted — regardless of retention policies or manual deletion.

1. Open Administration → Compliance.
2. Switch to the Litigation holds tab.
3. Create a hold with a name, description, start date and optional end date.
4. Add the mailboxes it covers.

While the hold is active, the messages it covers are deleted neither by the retention policy nor through the user interface.

eDiscovery search

The eDiscovery search lets administrators search for messages across domains.

Search criteria:

• Sender (from)
• Recipients (to, cc, bcc)
• Subject
• Full text of the message body
• Time range
• Domain

Results can be exported as JSON.

Journaling

Journaling copies incoming messages into a compliance mailbox automatically.

A journal rule consists of:

• Scope: all (every domain) or domain (one specific domain)
• Target mailbox: the mailbox that copies are written to
• Filter: an optional restriction by sender or recipient

DLP templates

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) inspects outgoing messages for sensitive content.

The default templates recognise:

• PII: IBANs, credit card numbers, SSN-like numbers
• Financial data: account, IBAN and BIC indicators
• Health data: patient and insurance numbers

Actions per template:

• log: write an audit log entry
• quarantine: move the message into incubation
• block: refuse delivery

You can create your own templates with arbitrary regular expressions, through the API or the administration interface.

Retention: three limits, named clearly

For retention and deletion, the operator decides; the server provides the tools (retention rules, litigation holds, deletion log). Three limits should be named before they become expensive in an emergency:

1. No retention reason per message. Retention rules carry a period, not the legal basis. Which period applies and why — GoBD, HGB, GDPR — is set by the operator and documented in their procedural documentation.
2. The server does not recognise commercial letters. Whether a mail is a commercial letter (Section 257 of the German Commercial Code (HGB), six years) is decided by the operator. AnnexGroup does not classify automatically: a wrong classification either violates an obligation or creates a mail that may no longer be deleted.
3. Deletions reach backups only when they expire. Deleted data remains in older backups until they rotate. Anyone restoring a backup must repeat the deletions from the time after it.

As proof of this: the server checks the chain of evidence itself daily via the change journal and the administration log; a break appears as a finding in the system status.

API endpoints

• GET/POST /api/v1/admin/litigation-holds
• GET/PUT/DELETE /api/v1/admin/litigation-holds/{id}
• POST/DELETE /api/v1/admin/litigation-holds/{id}/mailboxes/{mailbox_id}
• POST /api/v1/admin/ediscovery/search
• POST /api/v1/admin/ediscovery/export
• GET/POST /api/v1/admin/journal-rules
• GET/PUT/DELETE /api/v1/admin/journal-rules/{id}
• GET/POST /api/v1/admin/dlp-templates
• GET/PUT/DELETE /api/v1/admin/dlp-templates/{id}