Compress a PDF for email
Sized to fit under the attachment limits of Gmail, Outlook, and other major email providers.
How to compress a PDF for email
Email attachment limits vary by provider, and hitting them is one of the most common reasons people need to compress a PDF at all. Gmail caps attachments at 25MB total (and that 25MB has to cover your message body plus every attachment combined, not just the PDF alone). Outlook and Office 365 are typically capped at 20MB per message, though some enterprise/organizational Outlook setups lower that further — 10MB isn't unusual in corporate environments. Yahoo Mail sits around 25MB as well. If you don't know the recipient's specific provider, aiming well under 20MB is the safest bet.
A quality setting around 60-70% is usually enough to bring a multi-page scanned PDF comfortably under any of these limits while keeping it clearly readable — email attachments rarely need print-level quality since they're almost always viewed on a screen. If you're attaching multiple files in the same email, remember the limit applies to the total, so compress each file with that combined budget in mind.