How to Reduce a PDF's File Size for Email Attachments
Why PDFs get too big for email
Most email providers cap attachments around 20–25MB. PDFs blow past that limit almost entirely because of embedded images — scanned pages, high-res photos, or screenshots pasted into a document. The text itself is almost never the problem.
The fastest fix
- Open the PDF Compressor tool.
- Upload your PDF — it's processed locally in your browser, so nothing gets uploaded to a server.
- Download the compressed version and check the new file size before attaching it.
If it's still too big
A few other angles worth trying together with compression:
- Use PDF Page Extractor to send only the pages someone actually needs, instead of the whole document.
- Convert to grayscale if the PDF has color photos or scans that don't need to be in color.
- If the PDF is really a stack of scanned images, try PDF to Single Long Image and compress that instead — sometimes an image format compresses better than the original scan.