Understanding Storage Consumption in Einstein Activity Capture When Sync Email as Salesforce Activity Is Enabled

This article answers: how does storage consumption work in Einstein Activity Capture when Sync Email as Salesforce Activity is enabled, and how do you estimate and manage the storage this feature uses?

How Storage Is Consumed

Because emails now reside in your Salesforce org, they count toward your org's standard data storage allocation. Einstein Activity Capture synced email creates two records in Salesforce:

• 1 Task record - approximately 2 KB in size
• 1 EmailMessage record - size varies based on the actual email content (excluding attachments)

Note: Email attachments are not captured as part of the email sync, which helps limit file storage consumption.

What Factors Affect Storage Growth?

The total storage consumed depends on the following:

• Average size of emails (approximately 25 KB per email, excluding attachments)
• Number of emails sent and received per user per day
• Number of Einstein Activity Capture users in the org
• Length of the retention period for historical email data stored in Salesforce

How Do I Estimate Storage Consumption?

Use the following formula to estimate how much storage your org will consume:

(Average email size + Task wrapper) × (# emails/day) × (# Einstein Activity Capture users) × (# days retained)

Default size assumptions:

• Average email size: ~25 KB (excluding attachments)
• Task wrapper: ~2 KB
• Combined per email: ~27 KB

Example: 100 users × 50 emails/day × 180 days retained = ~24 GB

Note: This formula is intended for self-service storage estimation purposes only — it is not an official storage guarantee. Actual consumption may vary based on email body length, threading, and org-specific configurations.

Migrated email messages don't count toward your storage quota. This exclusion applies only to migrated emails. Any new emails captured count against your storage. While migrated email message records are excluded, the accompanying task records (one per email, about 2 KB each) count toward your storage quota.

Storage Management Recommendations

To minimize storage consumption and manage data growth:

• Regularly export or delete older activity data using Salesforce public APIs.
• Consider archiving email data to long-term storage solutions such as Salesforce Data Cloud.
• Use header-only capture if full email body storage is not required. This option captures only the sender, recipient, subject, and date/time — without the email body — significantly reducing storage per record.
• Monitor storage usage proactively in Setup > Storage Usage, especially before and after enabling this feature.
• If you retain years of email data (for example, a 5-year retention policy), you can quickly accumulate significant storage volumes. We recommend developing an archiving strategy. To store large volumes of data, you must purchase additional storage.

What Is Temporary Processing Storage?

Even with Sync Email as Salesforce Activity enabled, email data is temporarily processed on Activity Platform Hyperforce infrastructure for up to 30 days for purposes such as email insights generation and matching retries. This temporary storage:

• Is not accessible to admins or end users
• Is automatically deleted after 30 days
• Does not count toward org data storage that is on the Salesforce main instance

Note: Internal emails and excluded emails (per your org's exclusion settings) are not stored in Salesforce.