Email is one of the mainstream ways to share our moments with families and friends, and short video works with business partners. However, we are not able to share large long videos over Gmail, Outlook, or any other email platforms directly. The most effective solution is to compress a large video into a smaller file.
And this post is going to talk about how to make a video smaller for email on Mac and Windows 10 in different ways, as well as many details you should take into account. For example, how much you want to reduce? What is the best video compressor? How to compress videos for email attachments without losing quality? Let’s dive in and find the answers.
What Is the Maximum Size of an Email Attachment
Without exception, email servers refuse to accept large attachments. But the specific standard differs in different tools and platforms (email client and webmail). To make a proper compression, let’s take a look at the maximum video attachments size, which also should be the target file size for your large video:
- Gmail: 25MB for webmail
- Outlook: 10 -20 MB for email client
- Yahoo Mail: 25MB for webmail
- iCloud Mail: 20MB for webmail
- Hotmail: 10MB for webmail
- Zoho:20MB for webmail
- GMX mail: 50MB for webmail
How to Compress a Video for Email
Since you may have different needs for the compression ratio and the video quality in various situations, we summed up multiple methods including compressing MP4/AVI/WMV videos using VideoProc, zipping programs, online compressors, and cloud services, among which we recommend VideoProc most for its all-in-one solutions. Let’s have a look one by one.
Compress a video for Email with VideoProc
VideoProc is a simple yet powerful desktop program that also functions as professional video compression software. Most notably, it can reduce the file size to over 50% with the least quality loss by re-encoding with HEVC. For further size shrinking, it lets you lower the resolution, frame rate, and bitrate within a reasonable range.
In total, VideoProc supports 370+ input and 420+ output formats. So feel free to compress MP4, AVI, MKV, WMV, 4K, 3D, VR, and any large video files for email. With its advanced full-GPU acceleration tech, the compression speed can reach up to 47x real-time faster while keeping low CPU usage.
Here’s how to use VideoProc to compress videos to a file size accepted by Gmail.
- Open VideoProc and choose the Video option on its homepage.
- Drag the video you want to send via email into VideoProc. You can proceed to load more video files if necessary.
- Click Video at the bottom side and choose MP4 HEVC as the output format.
- Hit the Codec Option icon to open the customizable settings tab.
- Downsize the video by choosing a lower frame rate, resolution, and bit rate.
- When you see the estimated size is smaller than 25MB, click Done to save the changes.
- Browse a folder to save the video. Click the RUN button to export the video.
Make a Video Shorter and Smaller
Another easy method is to cut your video into a shorter clip if it is too long to be compressed to 25MB. At the moment, VideoProc works as the best video editor to cut your large video file into a shorter one without rendering or quality loss.
VideoProc has 3 cutting modes – cutting out any part of the video, trimming off starting and end parts, splitting a video into several clips evenly. All of them can be easily found out in the editing toolbar and the toolbox at the bottom. Here we take the general cut mode as an example.
- Import the video you want to send by Gmail or any other email to VideoProc.
- Choose a target video format. MP4 HEVC and MP4 H.264 are both okay.
- Click the scissor icon on the editing toolbar.
- Drag the green knobs to specify the starting and end time of your video clip. Click Cut.
- If you want multiple separated parts in your long video, repeat the step above to cut out more clips.
- Click Done to get back to the main UI.
- Select a destination folder to save the video.
- If you have cut more than one clip, check the merge option on the right side.
- Hit the RUN button to export the video.
Zip a Video File to Email
Mac and Windows computers both have built-in zipping programs in which you can make videos smaller and more convenient to transfer via email. Desktop zipping utilities have decent algorithms to reach a compression ratio of around 30%. But if you zipped a video file larger than 4GB on Windows, while the email recipient is using macOS, the zip file will fail to be opened on the Mac.
On Windows:
- Right-click on the video or a video folder.
- Choose Send to and Compressed (zipped) folder.
- A new zipped folder with the same name in the same path is created.
On Mac:
- Press and hold the control key, then click the video or a video folder you want to zip.
- Select Compress [file name] or Compress x Items from the shortcut menu.
- The video will be compressed with a .zip extension, while the folder with Archive.zip.
Compress a Video for Email Online and Free
If you don’t want to download any third-party software, you can turn to online video compressors. Once get access to a good network connection, you can reduce the video size to send by email easily. The video compressor from FreeConvert is one of the most recommended and fasted online tools, and it also lets you compress videos for email on iPhone and Android. Check how to use it to make a video less than 25MB.
- Open Video Compressor on freeconvert.com.
- Choose a video to load it to FreeConvert from your device, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
- Select MP4 as the output format.
- Click the gear icon beside the format option to open advanced settings.
- Switch the compression method to Target a file size (MB).
- Input the target size, for example, 25MB. Apply settings.
- Hit the Compress Now button. After it finishes, download the video to your computer.
Send a Large video by Email Using a Cloud Service
Instead of reducing the file size of a video, you can share the entire video of the original quality via a cloud link. You can use Google Drive, Dropbox, or One Drive which all provide free cloud storage and share services. To send large videos via email, you need to:
- Log in to a cloud storage platform that you often use. Or, create a new account.
- Upload your large long video to it from either your computer or mobile device.
- Create a share link and allow viewers to watch and download.
- Paste the link to the main content in the email and send it to your friends or business partners.
