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How to email a video bigger than 25MB

Gmail and Outlook.com both cap attachments at 25 MB per message. Both figures checked against Google’s and Microsoft’s own help pages on 1 September 2026. Almost any video longer than a few seconds is bigger than that, which is how you ended up here. Below: what each provider actually does with an oversized file, and the three realistic ways to get the video delivered.

What the limits actually are

Gmail allows up to 25 MB of attachments on a message. Go over and Gmail does not refuse — it quietly uploads the file to Google Drive and sends the recipient a link instead of an attachment.

Outlook.com allows 25 MB of attachments as well, and offers OneDrive sharing (up to 2 GB per file) as its over-the-limit route.

One more squeeze that surprises people: email encodes attachments as text (Base64), which inflates them by roughly a third in transit. A file that is nominally under the cap can still push the whole message over it, so treat 25 MB as a ceiling to stay well under, not a target to graze. Aiming at 18–20 MB is the safe read.

Why your video is over the limit

Video size is bitrate times length, and phones record at bitrates meant for a big screen, not for an inbox. A single minute of iPhone 4K footage runs to several hundred megabytes; even 1080p eats the 25 MB budget in well under a minute. The camera app is not wrong, it just is not answering the question an attachment asks.

Three ways to send it

1. Compress it under the cap

Re-encoding the video at a saner bitrate is the only route where the recipient still gets an actual file — no link, no expiry, no permissions screen, nothing to sign in to, and it works with every mail provider including the corporate servers that strip links. Our video compressor takes a target size: type 18 MB, drop the file, attach the result. It runs entirely in your browser, so the video is not uploaded to us or anyone. If only part of the footage matters, run it through the video trimmer first — shorter is smaller, for free.

2. Let the Drive or OneDrive link happen

For a very long video that cannot survive compression to 25 MB, the link is the right tool, and Gmail will build it for you automatically. The costs are practical: you need the storage space free, the recipient may need to ask for access if the permissions come out wrong, and the file sits in your cloud account until you remember to delete it.

3. Skip email entirely

If the recipient is someone you also chat with, the chat apps are far more generous than any inbox — WhatsApp takes files up to 2 GB, Telegram the same on a free account. Here are the current limits of each app, with the date we checked each one.

Common questions

Will 25MB of video look terrible?

For a clip of a minute or two, no — camera bitrates are so far above what the content needs that the first big cut mostly sheds waste. For a half-hour recording, yes, 25 MB is too small a box; send a link instead.

Does compressing here upload my video somewhere?

No. The encoding runs inside your browser and the file never leaves your device — and you do not have to take that on faith: here is how to verify what any compressor site does.

My file is huge — several gigabytes. Same answer?

Same tool, different guide: compressing a video over 1GB covers the caps other converters put on big files and what to expect locally.

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