Big file email attachments

When sending messages over these services, they will automatically give you a helping hand and suggest alternatives—such as using Google drive for Gmail attachments and OneDrive for Outlook. In practice, most email servers—and some email clients—enforce their own size limits.

In general, when attaching files to an email, you can be reasonably sure that up to 10MB of attachments are okay. Some email servers may have smaller limits, but 10MB is generally the standard. Many servers are configured to not accept more than 10MB of attachments. So 10MB of files on your disk will become about 13MB of data when attached to an email. By far, your simplest option is to store files you want to share on a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive.

You can then share the file with someone and inform them via email that you have done so. They can then click a link and download the file directly to their computer. If you use Gmail or Outlook. Gmail and Outlook will walk you through choosing a file that already exists in your cloud storage drive or uploading a new file.

This is the option many email providers are pushing us towards—if you try to attach a large file in Gmail or Outlook. For example, if you had a 50MB file you wanted to email—or even a collection of large files—you could use a file compression program like 7-Zip to create an archive, and then split the archive into five 10MB pieces.

After splitting the archive, you can then attach all the separated pieces to separate emails. The recipient will need to download each attachment, and then use a file extraction program to extract the larger, complete file from the separate archives.

While it can be a bit cumbersome, this traditional method still works as well as it always did. To help answer the large attachment problems, a number of file-sending services have sprung up online over the years. These services let you upload a file, and then give you a link to your upload. You can then paste that link into an email and the recipient can click the link and download the file.

Of course, these services have to make money somehow. They may do that by displaying ads, limiting the maximum file size available to free users, or demanding a subscription fee. Of course, you could encrypt the files before uploading them — but that would add additional hassle for the recipient, too. However, we typically recommend just using a cloud storage service instead.

Use Google Fonts in Word. Use FaceTime on Android Signal vs. Customize the Taskbar in Windows This site requires JavaScript. Pick Files. Select File.. Can't use this site? Drop us a note. Your E-mail required Valid e-mail address required. Send To optional , up to 3 addresses Invalid entry. Keep For 2 days 7 days 15 days Secure with Password. Message Return Receipt. Generate Link. Use the least privileged delegated or application permission, Calendars. Read , as appropriate, for this operation.

For more information, see calendar permissions. Use the least privileged delegated or application permission, Mail. For more information, see mail permissions. At any point of time before the upload session expires, if you have to cancel the upload, you can use the same initial opaque URL to delete the upload session.

Because the initial opaque URL is pre-authenticated and contains the appropriate authorization token for subsequent queries for that upload session, do not specify an Authorization request header for this operation. This error is returned when attempting to create an upload session to attach a file smaller than 3 MB. If the file size is under 3 MB, you should do a single POST on the attachments navigation property of the message or of the event.

Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Is this page helpful? Please rate your experience Yes No. Any additional feedback? Important Be aware of a known issue if you're attaching large files to a message or event in a shared or delegated mailbox.

CreateUploadSession attachmentItem. FILE; attachmentItem.