Compress a video to send by email

Email size limits

In Gmail, a personal account can send up to 25 MB of attachments in one email. Work and school accounts get limits set by their administrator. When the attachments add up to more than the limit, Gmail removes them and puts a Google Drive link in the email instead (Gmail Help).

Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail stop at 25 MB as well, though they do not all count the same parts of an email; the 25 MB page compares them. At work, classic Outlook with an Exchange mailbox defaults to 10 MB, and the person you write to has a limit for what they can receive. If you are not sure, a smaller file is the safer choice: 10 or 15 MB gets past more limits than 25 MB does.

At 30 frames per second, with the sound at 128 kbps (96 kbps in the 360p row, where Auto re-encodes it). A longer video still fits: Auto picks a smaller picture until it does, and shows you which before you start.

A file, not a link

A Drive or cloud link works, but the person has to open the link to get the video, and the file stays in your online storage. An attachment arrives with the email itself and can be saved straight away.

Gmail also notes that attachments count toward your Google storage, which is shared by Drive, Photos and Gmail (Gmail Help), so a compressed video also takes less of it in your Sent mail.

Longer videos

At 25 MB, a clean 1080p picture lasts about a minute, and a 5-minute video comes out at 360p. For something longer, send only the part that matters: open Compress only part of the video, or split it with the cut video tool and send the parts in separate emails, each under the limit.

A screen recording with nothing to hear can lose its sound: tick Remove the sound and the picture gets all the room.

Sending from a phone

On Android, open this page in Chrome, compress the video and press Download. The MP4 is in the Files app, or under Downloads in Chrome's menu (Google). In the Gmail app, tap Compose, then Attach, then Files, and pick it (Gmail Help).

On an iPhone, open this page in Safari and do the same. The MP4 lands in the Downloads folder of the Files app (Apple), where your email app can attach it. Leave the page open while it works: a phone takes longer than a laptop, and it can pause a page you switch away from.

Mail Drop on iPhone, iPad and Mac

Apple Mail has its own way around attachment limits. When a message is bigger than your provider allows, Mail offers to send the attachments with Mail Drop, which puts them in iCloud and sends a link. Mail Drop takes attachments of up to 5 GB, and the people you send them to have 30 days to download them (Apple).

That suits a long video that would lose too much at 25 MB. Compress it here instead when you want the video to arrive as a file that never expires, when the person may open the email more than a month later, or when you send from an app without Mail Drop. Apple adds that the recipient's own email app may have a smaller size limit.

What the person you email receives

They get the MP4 and nothing else. It is an H.264 video, the format browsers used by about 97% of people can play (caniuse), so they can watch it without installing anything.

The video was compressed on your device, and the file carries no title, recording place, date or phone model from the original. Nothing passes through uncrop.si on the way.