Your PDF is too big to email. Here is what to do.
The message will not send, or it came back rejected. The PDF is too big to email, and it has to get smaller before the attachment will go. Three things are worth trying, in a particular order, and there is one honest case where none of them works. The first two happen in your browser, with no account and without sending your document to anyone.
Find the number you have to get under
Start with the number you actually have to beat. Mail providers state their own attachment ceilings, they are not the same from one provider to the next, and they change. Read the help page for the account you are sending from rather than trusting a figure you saw somewhere.
Then check the other end. The receiving mail server has a ceiling of its own, and for a work address it is often the lower of the two. The stricter one decides whether your message arrives.
Now aim well under it. An attachment is not sent as the file sits on your disk — mail encodes it as text for transport, so the message that leaves your outbox is larger than the file you attached. A file measured a hair under the stated limit will still bounce. Treat the number as a ceiling to stay clear of, not a target to hit.
Three ways to get a PDF under an email attachment limit
1. Compress it
Try this first, because it is the only route that keeps the document whole and keeps it as an attachment. Open the file in Compress and it is read on your device, then you are shown the options it can offer, each with an estimated size worked out from your own file. Pick one, look at the number, download it.
What it has room to work on is pictures. A file that is heavy because of photographs or a color scan can come down. A file that is heavy because of embedded fonts or hundreds of pages of text mostly cannot, and the tool says so instead of running and handing back the same size. If nothing on offer would save at least 5% of the original file size, it tells you the file cannot be made meaningfully smaller before you choose anything. It also never gives you back a file larger than the one you opened.
2. Split it and send the part they need
The recipient often wants six pages out of eighty. Splitting is the quickest way under a limit and the kindest to the person reading it. Use Split PDF to pull out the range and send that.
This is the wrong answer when the document has to stay whole: a contract, a signed form, a report someone will file. Four messages with four pieces attached is worse than one link, and it turns your size problem into their filing problem.
3. Send a link instead
If the document has to stay whole and will not come down far enough, put it in whatever storage you already use and send a link to it. Size stops mattering.
PDFCheetah cannot do this part. It does not upload or store your file, so there is nothing here to link to. And a link has real costs: the file now sits on someone else's server, the recipient may need an account or may hit a permission wall, some organizations block links to outside storage in incoming mail, and links expire. If the message is a record that someone may reread in two years, an attachment is worth the trouble.
If it still will not fit
A PDF that stays stubbornly large is usually a scan. Someone fed paper through a scanner at a high resolution, in color, and every page arrived as a full-page photograph. Ten pages of that outweigh hundreds of pages of typed text.
If those scanned pages are in color or gray, Compress can bring their resolution down and re-save them, and that is the case it handles best. If the pages were scanned as plain black and white, it will most likely leave them exactly as they are — that way of storing a page is not one it can re-save any smaller. The only choice left is the option that turns each page into a picture. It gets the size down, but the text stops being selectable and searchable, and form fields, links and outlines do not come through it. The tool labels that option plainly and never picks it for you.
Two other files it will not help with. A password-protected PDF is refused before anything starts, because the tool cannot open it — take the password off in whatever made the file, then come back. A signed PDF can be compressed, but the signature will not apply to the smaller copy, so keep the original if the signature is the point.
Every size you are shown is an estimate, measured on your device with your browser's own image encoder. Browsers do not agree exactly, so the file you get may land either side of the figure.
If none of this gets you under the limit, go back to where the file came from. Scan the pages again at a lower resolution, or export the PDF again from the program that made it with a smaller image setting. That fixes the cause instead of shaving the result.
Start here
Both tools run in your browser. Your file is not uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is added to what you make.