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Your PDF is too large to email

Gmail stops at roughly 25 MB per message, and many corporate servers stop lower. A scan of a ten-page contract can be 60 MB, which is not because it has a lot in it — it is because of how it was captured.

Why the scan is so big

A phone photograph of a page is a full-colour image with sensor noise in every pixel, a shadow gradient across the paper and a texture in the desk behind it. Compression has to describe all of that, and none of it is the document. Ten such pages in a PDF wrapper is routinely 50–80 MB.

The same ten pages, evenly lit and converted to bitonal, are often under 2 MB — with the letters sharper than the original, because bitonal keeps edges rather than blurring them.

The order that works

1. Even out the lighting first. This alone often removes most of the size, because the shadow gradient was consuming the compression budget.
2. Drop to 300 DPI. Higher resolution adds size and adds nothing a reader uses.
3. Use bitonal for typed pages. Keep colour only for pages with a photograph, a coloured seal or a signature that matters.
4. Set the target on the finished file, not on each page separately.

When you cannot get under the limit

If the document genuinely needs colour at full resolution — a set of photographs, a plan, a certificate with security printing — splitting it into two emails is more reliable than compressing it until it fails its purpose. Name the files "1 of 2" and "2 of 2" so nothing gets read as missing.

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