Just observed something and one of our users noticed it as well. When you have a message with a large number of recipients, the stub ends up being large as well.
In a test, I created a message with nearly 3000 recipients and saved it in the Drafts folder. The original message shows as 1 MB. When I Store in Vault, the stub shows as 500 KB.
Have others noticed this? Is it by design? Our Mailbox Policy > Shortcut Content is set to Customize and Include recipient information in shortcut. Is the recipient data in the stubs somehow compressed?