5 min readBy Dakshesh B
How to shrink a PDF for email attachment limits (Gmail, Outlook)
Hit Gmail's 25 MB and Outlook's 20 MB limits by compressing your PDF in the browser - no upload required.
Bounced email because your PDF is too big? Most providers cap attachments: Gmail at 25 MB, Outlook.com at around 20 MB, and many corporate mail servers far lower. Here's how to get under the line.
Why PDFs get huge
The usual culprit is images - scanned documents and PDFs full of high-resolution photos balloon in size. Text-only PDFs are almost always small.
Compress without uploading
ShrinkTo's PDF compressor re-renders pages as optimized images at a sensible resolution and quality, which dramatically reduces size for image-heavy and scanned files - all in your browser.
- Open the Compress PDF tool.
- Drop your PDF in.
- Choose a quality level (Balanced is a good start).
- Download - and check it's under your provider's limit.
Other tricks
- Split the PDF and send it in parts.
- Remove pages you don't need before sending.
- For text-only documents, make sure you're not exporting at an unnecessarily high resolution.