Message and Attachment Size Limits in Gmail
In both cases, you may be out of luck.
Gmail processes
- messages up to 25 MB
in size. This limit is applied to the
- sum of the message's text and the encoded attachment.
Typically, encoding makes the size of the file grow slightly.
Messages exceeding the limit sent to your Gmail account will bounce back to the sender. Messages larger than 25 MB that you try to send from Gmail will yield an error.
Sending and Receiving Larger Files with Gmail
The most straight forward way to work around the message size limit in Gmail is to:
- Put the file you want to send on a web server.
- You can password-protect the file to prevent public access.
- There are many options for getting web space for free.
- Mail a link to the file from Gmail.
The additional benefit you get for this slight inconvenience is that you avoid irritating or annoying people with huge attachments. Sure, downloading the file from the web server will take just as long, but the recipient can decide when to do and when to stop it with the pleasing feeling of being in control.
Alternatively, you can split the file in smaller chunks (which I do not recommend) or try a file sending service.
