How to reduce PDF file size for email (without ruining it)
Most email providers cap attachments around 20–25 MB — and scanned PDFs blow past that fast. Here's how to get under the limit without making your document unreadable.
Why PDFs get huge
Nine times out of ten, it's images. A phone-scanned contract is really a stack of photos, and each photo can be several megabytes. Text-only PDFs are almost always tiny already.
The fix: compression presets
Open our Compress PDF tool and drop your file in. You'll see three levels:
- Smallest size — best for email. Images are downsampled hard; fine for reading on screen, not for printing.
- Balanced — the default. Usually 50–80% smaller with images that still look good.
- High quality — light compression when you need to stay print-ready.
For email, start with Smallest size. If the result looks too rough, run the original again on Balanced — your original never changes, so you can retry freely.
If it's still too big
Split the document with Split PDF and send it in parts, or share the pages that matter using Delete pages to remove the rest.
Your files are deleted from our servers automatically after 2 hours — compress with confidence.