It’s Not a Bug — "It’s a Design Flaw With Significant Financial Consequences"

Email Messages + Einstein Activity Capture = A Surprise Storage Bill

Email Message - [Insert My Standard Statement Here]

I drone on (relentlessly, unapologetically) about how EmailMessage is one of the very few objects in Salesforce where storage is calculated based on actual bytes consumed, not record count.

It's what makes me fun at parties.

EmailMessage records can quietly eat 30... 50... 80% of your entire data storage allocation without anyone noticing until it's too late. It’s why any decision to activate EmailMessage should include design discussions about storage growth, growth runway, compliance requirements, archiving strategies and purging strategies.

Short story, Email Messages will quickly become your biggest storage expense.

Introducing Einstein Activity Capture

EAC is a background sync service that connects each individual user's mailbox to Salesforce. It's genuinely a great tool. With minimal configuration, EAC automatically captures email activity without having to rely on user behavior. Adoption is easy. Friction is low.

But the devil is in the details. Before you enable EAC, you need to know two important things:

(1) EAC ingests each user's mailbox independently

(2) Salesforce provides no dedupication.

This means EAC does not treat an email as a single shared message. It treats it as whatever is in this user’s mailbox.

So if one email is sent to User A and User B, and both have EAC enabled, here’s what actually happens.

The Math Nobody Warns You About

Action	Result
User A’s mailbox → EAC ingests email	1 EmailMessage record created (18 KB) 1 Attachment record created (800 KB image)
User B’s mailbox → EAC ingests email	1 EmailMessage record created (18 KB) 1 Attachment record created (800 KB image)

That’s 18 KB of unexpected data storage and 800 KB of unexpected file storage for a single email sent to two people. Scale that across your organization and the numbers get ugly fast.

I know it smells like a bug. But officially, it is not.

It’s a design flaw... that just happens to accelerate financial consequences. Depending on your email volume, you might run out of storage years earlier than your projections ever anticipated.

...And Here Comes that Letter

You know the one.

Your organization is out of storage. Please purchase additional storage to avoid service disruption.”

Why it Matters

This is the part everyone wishes wasn’t true. EmailMessage + EAC doesn’t just create clutter — it creates compound consequences across cost, performance, data quality, and risk. Once you understand how the system behaves, the downstream impact becomes painfully obvious.

Action	Result
Financial	Email storage is among the most expensive in Salesforce… and you’re paying for duplicates.
Operational	Duplicate records slow queries and reporting… and your users now have to sift through noise to find real data.
AI Skew	In a world driving toward AI‑powered insights, duplicated email data quietly distorts models, signals, and predictions.
Risk	EmailMessage records often contain sensitive content… and duplication multiplies your exposure footprint across storage, retention, audit, and legal discovery.

Concerned you might have a problem?

If you need any assistance, we’re here to help — whether that’s auditing your duplicates, auditing your ingestion pipeline, or designing a cleaner, more intentional architecture that keeps your storage under control.