How to reduce PDF size to send by email

What’s the maximum attachment size?

Every service has its own limit, and it often counts all the files in the message:

• Gmail: about 25 MB per message.
• Outlook: about 20 MB per message.
• Online forms, government portals, job applications: often 2 to 5 MB per document, sometimes less.

If you don’t know the limit, aim for under 5 MB: the file will go through almost anywhere and open quickly, even on a phone.

Reduce PDF size in 3 steps

1. Open the “Compress PDF” tool and select your file.
2. Compare the estimated sizes for each level: low, recommended or strong. For documents of 30 pages or fewer, they appear before you even start compressing.
3. Click “Compress PDF”, check the size before and after, then download the smaller file.

PDFRoll first tries to shrink the file without changing any of its content. If that isn’t enough, it optimizes how the pages are rendered and automatically keeps the smallest result.

Why are some PDFs so large?

It’s almost always the images: pages scanned at high resolution, photos taken with a phone, illustrations that were never optimized. A ten-page scanned document can exceed 20 MB. A PDF created straight from a word processor, on the other hand, is usually already small.

That’s why compression works best on scans and photo-heavy documents.

File still too large?

• Try the “strong” level: image quality drops slightly, but the text stays readable.
• Cut the document into several parts with the “Split PDF” tool, then send them in separate emails.
• If the PDF was made from photos, recreate it with “JPG to PDF” using smaller images, then compress it.
• For a very large file, a share link (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox) is still the best option.

What about privacy?

People often compress sensitive documents: bank statements, pay slips, medical records. With PDFRoll, compression is done by your browser and the file never leaves your device, unlike most online services, which receive it on their servers.