Is my document uploaded to compress it?

No. Compression happens in your browser. The document is never transmitted, logged or stored — which matters more than usual here, since the PDFs people need to email are typically contracts, invoices and statements.

Why 5 MB and not 25 MB?

Gmail allows 25 MB, but many corporate mail gateways reject anything over 10 MB and some cap at 5. Targeting 5 MB means it gets through regardless of what the recipient's employer runs.

Will the text still be selectable?

If the lossless pass alone gets under the limit, yes — nothing is degraded. If your PDF needs rasterising to fit, the result tells you, and in that case the text becomes an image.

What if it still will not fit?

Split it. Sending chapters or sections as separate messages is more reliable than pushing a single file through aggressive compression, and the recipient can actually read the result.

Your PDF is too big to email

Runs in your browser

Drop the PDF in below. It is compressed to fit under 5 MB — the size that clears essentially every mail system — and then checked to confirm it actually fits.

Drop PDFs hereor click to choose — nothing is uploaded

What the limits actually are

Gmail rejects attachments over 25 MB and switches you to a Drive link. Outlook.com allows 20 MB, but Microsoft 365 tenants commonly cap at 10 MB and plenty of corporate gateways are set lower still. Because the sending and receiving servers both apply their own limit, a message can leave your outbox and bounce off theirs. Targeting 5 MB avoids the whole question.

Why attachments are bigger than the file

Email cannot carry raw binary, so attachments are base64 encoded in transit, which inflates them by roughly a third. A 19 MB PDF arrives at the server as about 25 MB. This is the usual reason a file that looks comfortably under the limit is rejected anyway.

What gets sacrificed

A lossless rewrite is tried first, which reclaims structural overhead without touching a pixel or breaking text selection. If your file cannot reach the target that way — usually because it is mostly scanned images — pages are rasterised, and the result says so explicitly. After rasterising, the text is a picture of text: still readable, no longer selectable or searchable. That matters if the recipient needs to copy figures out of it, or if the document is going into an archive that will later be searched.

When compression is the wrong answer

If a PDF is enormous because it contains fifty scanned pages, squeezing it under 5 MB will make every page noticeably worse. Splitting it and sending the relevant section is almost always the better outcome: the recipient gets a legible document and you avoid attaching pages they did not ask for. For genuinely large files that must travel whole, a shared link beats an attachment — most mail systems are far happier with a URL than with 20 MB of base64.

FAQ

Is my document uploaded to compress it?: No. Compression happens in your browser. The document is never transmitted, logged or stored — which matters more than usual here, since the PDFs people need to email are typically contracts, invoices and statements.
Why 5 MB and not 25 MB?: Gmail allows 25 MB, but many corporate mail gateways reject anything over 10 MB and some cap at 5. Targeting 5 MB means it gets through regardless of what the recipient's employer runs.
Will the text still be selectable?: If the lossless pass alone gets under the limit, yes — nothing is degraded. If your PDF needs rasterising to fit, the result tells you, and in that case the text becomes an image.
What if it still will not fit?: Split it. Sending chapters or sections as separate messages is more reliable than pushing a single file through aggressive compression, and the recipient can actually read the result.

The tools behind this

Doing this regularly? The Email-Ready PDF recipe runs the whole job in one pass.