A different way to handle Microsoft Exchange emails

I'm not an Exchange SME by any means, so please forgive my ignorance. Does Exchange have different methods of handling email other than delivering a copy of an email to each mailbox it's intended for? For example, if I want 50 people to receive an email that has a 5mb attachment, 50 copies of the email will be created and distributed to all mailboxes, which will generate 250MB of traffic and 250MB of required storage.

But, what if instead of duplicating the email 50 times, it only creates the one email and gives permissions to 50 people to view it. To the user, everything is still the same: an email pops up in their inbox and they can forward and delete it, move it to a different folder, create rules, etc. The only difference is that there's only one instance of the message that many people have access to instead of many instances of the message where only one person has access to each instance. A user's mailbox no longer stores emails, but instead just stores links to emails. Deleting a message from someone's inbox doesn't actually delete the message, but instead just removes the link to the message from the user's mailbox.

This could cut down email storage and bandwidth and improve Exchange administration exponentially. If I need to search Exchange for an email sent from a specific outside sender with a specific subject with a specific attachment, I'd have to search across the entire enterprise, through every single mailbox to find all remnants of that email. However, with this other method, I'd just have to search the one database to see if the email exists. I could delete the email entirely, or just delete all the links to it so that it still exists, but doesn't show up in anyone's "mailbox" so that I can grab a copy of it and do some forensics on the attachment.

I hope this makes sense? Is there something like this that exists for Exchange? Thanks.

What you're talking about is Single Instance Storage (SIS). Exchange in the version 4/5 days did have it. But the short answer as to why it doesn't exist anymore is that it adds complexity, and storage is cheap nowadays. SIS is simply less relevant.

See https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2010/02/22/dude-wheres-my-single-instance/

You could also implement an inbound-and-outbound 3rd-party large-file-attachment service if you're concerned about sizing storage.