Reduce Email Attachment Sizes

This page has been created with the sole purpose of helping you reduce the size of your emails that contain scanned documents.

Many multifunction devices (devices that have a printer copier scanner and possibly fax in one unit) have very easy facilities to pop in a document for scanning to email.

One common issue is that the default scan settings may be set to a very high quality… Much higher than might be needed to simply view or print out the document.

What you will need to do is to become familiar with your particular device and learn how to control the DPI settings.

DPI stands for dots per inch, and basically, the higher the DPI you scan at the the bigger the resulting file size (and therefore the email attachment) will be.

Scanning in colour will also result in bigger file sizes, so do consider scanning in greyscale instead.

In general, you want to stick to the following guidelines, so check your scanner settings before you scan and you should be able to significantly reduce the size of your emails.

Scanning Guidelines:

• Scan in a “compressed” file format, such as JPG or PNG.  Alternately, scanning to PDF is probably the best bet.

Also check if your device has a “Scan to PDF” function, as this function is usually preset to create smaller sizes.

It is very important that before you hit send on your email to check the total size of the attachments.

As a guide, your email should be no bigger than perhaps one or two megabytes (MB).  That is usually enough for more than 10 scanned pages, if you’ve got the settings right.

This is a work in progress 🙂  Please leave your questions below and check back here often!