Find out what is the maximum email size limit for emails & file attachments sent to popular email account providers, such as Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo and others.
Mainly for security reasons, all email server providers limit the maximum email size that an email account can receive. Otherwise, if there would be no maximum email size limit, the email server would risk to be bombarded with very large emails, causing it to cease working properly.
Some free email address providers also enforce commercial limitations on the email size: the free account gets a low maximum email size limit, but you can increase the maximum limit by upgrading to a paid account.
Obviously, if you send an email that exceeds the maximum email size limit of the recipient’s email provider, your email will bounce off and you will receive an email error back in your mailbox. Usually, you will receive one of the following error messages:
– “Attachment size exceeds the allowable limit”;
– “552: Message size exceeds maximum permitted”;
– “System Undeliverable, message size exceeds outgoing message size limit”;
– “The size of the message you are trying to send exceeds the global size limit of the server. The message was not sent; reduce the message size and try again”.
Here is the values list of the maximum email size limit for various email providers and email client applications. These email size limits usually apply on both sending and receiving emails.
| Email Provider | Maximum Email Size Limit |
|---|---|
| Gmail | 25Mb (per email sent or received) |
| Outlook.com and Hotmail | 10Mb (per file attachment) or 300Gb (only for files attached via SkyDrive!) |
| Yahoo Mail | 25Mb (per email) or unlimited (only for files attached via DropBox – limited by your DropBox account size) |
| AOL | 25Mb (per email sent or received) |
| Mail.com | 50Mb (per attachment) and 10Mb (per file) |
| Zoho Mail | 12Mb (per email) and 10Mb (per file) |
| GoDaddy Workspace | 30Mb (per email) and 20Mb (per file) |
| Email Client | Maximum Email Size Limit |
| Microsoft Outlook | 20Mb (per attachment) |
| Mozilla Thunderbird | unlimited |
| Windows Live Mail | 10Gb (per email) and no more than 50Mb per file attached |
A simple answer would be: no, you can’t bypass these maximum size limits. However, there are workarounds:
– if you are an Outlook user, you can install Weight Diet for Outlook and automatically compress outgoing file attachments, so they have more chances to “fit”;
– you can upload the files-to-be-attached to cloud storage servers (like DropBox, Google Drive or SkyDrive) and include the download link in your email.
View Comments
What is the maximum Outlook.com per MESSAGE?? - per attachment isn't so relevant.
Outlook.com doesn't enforce any size limit for the email content itself, but only for its file attachments. Actually, the virtually limitless size feature of Outlook.com emails, due to SkyDrive, is one of their key advantages.