Including legal email footers compliantly

Business emails of German companies are subject to an imprint obligation. If the legal footers are missing, warnings and a coercive fine of up to 5,000 euros are possible. Central management makes sure that every outgoing message carries the details.

Which details are mandatory

The mandatory details depend on the legal form:

• Under section 37a HGB, registered merchants, general partnerships and limited partnerships state the company name, the place of the commercial establishment, the register court and the commercial register number.
• Under section 35a GmbHG, a German limited company additionally names its managing directors and, where a supervisory board exists, its chair.
• Under section 80 AktG, a stock corporation names the members of the management board, the chair of the management board and the chair of the supervisory board.

The details apply to external business emails as they do to classic business letters.

Maintaining company data centrally

The legal data is stored centrally once, not per user. In the portal under settings in the Disclaimer area, fields are available for this:

• Company name, address, central phone number and website
• Commercial register and register number
• VAT identification number
• Authorised representatives
• The competent supervisory authority
• Additional legal texts

Every field can be used as a placeholder in templates, for instance the commercial register entry or the legal text.

Company data feeds the statutory footers.

Including it in the template

In the signature template the company data is inserted as account placeholders and the sender data as user placeholders. The editor inserts them from a picker, see creating a signature. Through rules and assignment the full disclaimer applies to external recipients, while internal messages receive a short signature.

Data protection and confidentiality notice

Besides the mandatory details, a data protection notice with a reference to the privacy policy and a confidentiality notice can be appended. A confidentiality notice has limited legal effect in Germany but serves as an indication of the intention to keep matters confidential. As a legal notice it can be assigned specifically to external recipients only.

Evidence and being up to date

Changes to company data take effect immediately for all users, without intervention on the endpoint. Every adjustment of a template is logged in an audit-proof manner. The audit trail under GDPR Art. 30 proves to auditors which disclaimer was active when. The statutory footer is to be kept separate from the cryptographic signature, for signed and encrypted messages see SecureMail.