Compress an Image for Email
You hit send, wait, and get a bounce-back: attachment too large. Most servers cap a message near 20-25 MB total, and a single phone photo can already eat a big chunk of that, especially once email encoding inflates it.
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The real attachment limits
Gmail and Outlook both refuse messages over roughly 25 MB. That figure is the whole message, not one file, so two large photos plus a signature image can trip it on their own.
Email also encodes attachments in base64, which adds about a third to the size in transit. A 20 MB file leaves your outbox closer to 27 MB, which is why a photo that looks fine on disk still bounces.
Recipients on stricter corporate servers may reject anything over 10 MB, so aiming small is safer than aiming for the ceiling.
What to send instead
A typical 6 MB phone photo drops to a few hundred KB with compress JPEG and still looks sharp on any screen. That clears every common limit with room to spare.
Keep JPEG for photos and snapshots. It was built for continuous-tone images and gives you the smallest file at a given quality, which is exactly what an email body needs.
If you have several images, compress each one before attaching rather than zipping the originals. A zip of huge files is still huge, and many gateways scan inside archives anyway.