In this paper, we propose to optimize energy and overheads of a network by reducing the copies of messages in the network. The key idea behind the proposed scheme is to select the distance of encountered node from the destination to decide the relay nodes. This limits the number of relay nodes and thus reduces the communication energy and message overheads by producing lesser number of copies of the messages in the network. Further to maintain delivery of messages, the proposed protocol evaluates delivery probability of relay nodes. The measures of probability are inter-contact delay and variance in delay between the nodes. This probability is used to decide how many copies of a message is transferred to the encountered node. This further reduces the communication energy as well as message overheads. The simulation results show that our proposed strategy reduces message overheads and energy consumption as compared to the previous existing strategy while maintaining comparable delivery probability.