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Compress a PDF for email — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo limits.
Email providers cap attachments at sizes that haven't moved in over a decade. Most PDFs that "won't send" are sitting just over the limit. Drop yours in and pick a preset — Low for printable quality, High for the smallest output.
Email attachment limits, today
- Gmail. 25MB total per email (sum of all attachments). Files over that auto-upload to Google Drive instead.
- Outlook / Microsoft 365. 20MB for personal accounts, 25MB for most business accounts (admin-configurable up to 150MB).
- Yahoo Mail. 25MB attachment limit.
- iCloud Mail. 20MB; larger files use Mail Drop (up to 5GB, recipient downloads from iCloud).
- Corporate Exchange. Defaults to 10MB but admins frequently raise it to 25-50MB. Recipient's gateway also matters.
- ProtonMail. 25MB per email.
The recipient's mailbox limit also matters — sending a 22MB attachment to a 20MB-cap mailbox bounces. When in doubt, get under 15MB. That comfortably clears every major provider.
Pick a compression preset
- Low. Light recompression. Most contracts and reports drop 20-40%. Use when the PDF will be printed or signed.
- Medium. Recommended default. 40-60% reduction. Visually identical to the original on screen.
- High. Aggressive image downsampling to ~96 DPI. 60-80% reduction. Use for screen review only.
Common questions
- My PDF is 50MB. Can I email it after compression?
- Probably. The biggest single source of bloat in a 50MB PDF is usually scanned-page images at 300+ DPI. High preset typically gets these to 5-15MB. If it's still too big, split it (most chains handle two emails of 25MB fine).
- Why didn't compression shrink my PDF much?
- If the PDF is mostly text with embedded fonts, there's not much to remove. Where compression wins is on PDFs containing photos, diagrams, or scanned pages. A 4MB text-only PDF compressing to 3.5MB is normal — there's just no fat.
- Will the recipient be able to print it?
- Low and Medium presets print fine. High preset is screen-quality (96 DPI images) — text still looks sharp, but photos may show compression artefacts when printed.
- Are my files private?
- The compress action uses ConvertAPI as a backend (encrypted in transit, deleted after processing). For sensitive material, pair with our Smart Redact first to remove PII before sending.