How to Send Large Files by Email (Beating Every Provider's Limit)

Gmail allows 25 MB of attachments (and actually converts larger sends to Drive links), Outlook.com stops at 20 MB, and many corporate mail servers quietly cap inbound messages at 10 MB. The limit is smaller than it looks: attachments are encoded as base64 before sending, which inflates every file by roughly 33%. A 20 MB PDF becomes a 26.7 MB email — bounced.

The realistic budget per file

• Gmail (native attachment): aim for under 18 MB to leave room for the encoding overhead
• Outlook.com / Hotmail: aim for under 15 MB
• Work servers with a 10 MB cap: aim for 7 MB or less
• Bidding portals, universities and government forms: often 2 MB — check the fine print before you attach

What to compress, in order of payoff

PDFs are where people win the most. A scanned or exported PDF is usually full of over-sampled images; recompressing its images routinely shrinks it 50-90% while looking identical on screen. A 30-page scan that lands at 18 MB can slip under 2 MB without a visible change.

Photos come second: a phone camera spits out 4-9 MB JPEGs, but a 1920 px version at quality 80% is visually identical for screen viewing and weighs 200-400 KB. Videos are third: mail attachments are a terrible delivery method for video anyway — compress hard or send a link.

When compression is not enough

If the file simply cannot shrink further, split it: PDFs can be sent as two parts (mergeable again in seconds), archives can be sent as volume 1 of 2, and video can be trimmed to the relevant passage. What you should avoid is the 'private' cloud link that forwards your document through someone else's servers and lives at that URL forever.

Filenary compresses PDFs, images and videos entirely inside your browser — the file never leaves your device, so the compressed copy you email is the only copy that ever existed outside your computer. The PDF compressor works for the 2 MB application portal case just as well as the 25 MB Gmail case.