How to send a file that is too large for email

The wall you just hit

For a personal Gmail account the limit is 25 MB, and above it Gmail does not refuse the message. It "automatically removes the attachment and adds it as a Google Drive link in the email". Other providers sit in the same neighbourhood, between roughly 20MB and 25MB.

Two things follow from that. The first is that the wall is low: a ten-slide deck with photographs in it, a scanned contract, a handful of camera images, or a one-minute screen recording all clear 25MB without trying. The second is that a link is not a workaround anybody invented. It is what the email provider itself falls back to. The only real question is whose link it is and what it tells you afterwards.

Check the size first, it takes ten seconds

• Windows. Right-click the file, Properties, read Size.
• macOS. Click the file once and press Command-I.
• Phone. In Files or Photos, open the item and look at Info or Details.

Do this before you decide anything. Most people guess high, then spend twenty minutes compressing a file that would have sent as it was.

What to do at each size

The 150MB line is worth taking seriously rather than testing: the upload is refused at the door, not trimmed or queued.

Why a link does not bounce

An attachment is carried inside the message, so its weight is the message's weight and every server between you and the reader gets a vote on whether to accept it. A link carries no weight. The message is a few kilobytes whatever sits behind the address, so the things that break large attachments (a recipient's inbound size cap, a full mailbox, an attachment filter) stop applying.

It also fails earlier when it fails at all. A rejected attachment usually bounces after you press send, sometimes hours later. A file that is too big to host tells you so while you are still looking at the upload box.

What a link gives you that an attachment does not

Once the file lives at an address rather than inside a message, a few things become possible that were never possible with an attachment:

• You can see whether it was opened at all. Every Snapy link counts opens and downloads, shows which countries they came from and how long was spent reading, and emails you the first time somebody opens it. That is the free plan.
• You can put several files behind one address. The free plan holds one live link at a time, and there is no limit on how many files sit on it, so a set of twelve photographs is one link with a listing page, not twelve links or a zip the reader has to unpack.
• You can lock it. A password, an expiry date and a QR code are all free. A link with either of the first two is also kept out of search, because a page that can vanish should not be left in Google's index after it has gone.
• You can name it. contract-final.snapy.page reads better in an email than a forty-character file name, and it is easier to say down a phone.

Where the free plan runs out

Storage on the free plan is 1 GB, which is about six files at the full 150MB. Knowing which person opened it, the time they spent on each page, and an email on every open rather than just the first are on the paid plan. Nothing expires on its own: a link keeps working until you delete it or give it an expiry date.

Sending it, start to finish

1. Drop the file into the box on the homepage, or straight into the PDF door, the image door or the page door if you already know what you have.
2. Name the link, or leave it blank for a random one.
3. Type the code that arrives by email. That happens once per address, not once per file.
4. Paste the link into your message.

The person receiving it clicks and reads it in their browser. No account, no app, no extension, and nothing sitting in their downloads folder unless they choose to keep a copy.

The honest version of the advice

If your file is under 20MB, attach it and stop reading. If it is between 25MB and 150MB, a link is strictly better than anything you could do to the file itself. Compressing a PDF to squeeze under a limit costs you quality to solve a problem that has a free answer. And if it is over 150MB or it is a video, this is not the tool; use something built for bulk transfer, and do not spend an afternoon finding that out by uploading.