You're cc'd on a team email with a 28 MB PDF attached. Your phone choked downloading it. The colleague who sent it didn't think twice. Multiply by every recipient on the thread.
Large attachments are a quiet tax on everyone. Stop paying it; stop charging it.
The 10 MB rule
External attachments: under 10 MB. Internal team attachments: under 5 MB ideally. Anything bigger goes by link, not attachment.
This rule, applied consistently, eliminates most of the friction your colleagues silently absorb. They'll thank you indirectly by responding to your emails faster.
Compress as reflex, not response
Flint compress takes 10 seconds. Make it the last step before attaching anything. Most PDFs reduce by 60–80% with no visible quality change.
Don't wait until the email bounces to compress. Compress first, attach second.
Use share links for large files
Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, WeTransfer — all support shareable links. For anything over 10 MB that genuinely can't compress smaller, share the link in the email body.
Links have a bonus: the recipient can choose when to download. Attachments force everyone to receive the bytes immediately.
The recipient experience matters
A 25 MB attachment is fine on a fibre laptop. On the recipient's hotel wifi, on their phone in a taxi, on the colleague who's on a metered connection — it's a pain.
Smaller attachments arrive faster, preview inline, and feel polished. Bigger ones don't. The choice is entirely yours.
FAQ
What if the recipient explicitly needs high-res?
Send by link to a high-res copy, not as attachment. Same content, no bounce, no quota pressure.
What about compliance requirements that need original quality?
Compress is usually lossless for text and only optimises images. For genuine compliance archive (PDF/A), use lighter compression or skip it. Most business contracts are fine.
Does compressing affect printable quality?
For office-document printing, no. For high-quality print production, use lighter compression or send the original via link.
How do I get my team to adopt this?
Lead by example, then share the compress link with a one-line note. Most colleagues adopt the habit once they see how easy it is.
Ten seconds, ten megabytes. Compress your next attachment in Flint and stop being the colleague whose emails everyone dreads opening.