Convert by email
Every Plus account gets a private email address. Attach a file, put the format you want in the subject line, send it, and the converted file comes back as a reply.
Sending one
The reply carries the converted file as an attachment where it is small enough, and a download link where it is not. Both are always in the message, so a mail client that strips attachments still leaves you with a way to get the file.
- Attach the file to a new email — one file per message.
- Write the format you want in the subject line: pdf, png, mp4. Leave the subject empty and your chosen default format is used instead.
- Send it to your personal address, which you will find on the Automate page in your account.
Only you can use your address
The address contains a random token, and that token travels on the envelope of every message it is used in — so anyone who has seen one of your emails has seen the address. It is therefore never the only thing standing between a stranger and your account.
Every message is also checked against the address it was sent from. Mail from anywhere other than your account address, or one you have explicitly allowed, is dropped without a reply. That makes a leaked address a nuisance rather than a way to spend your conversions.
If your address does get out, you can issue a new one at any time. The old one stops working immediately.
Size is decided by email, not by your plan
This is the limit people are most often surprised by. Your own email provider caps what it will send — Gmail and Outlook both stop at around 20 MB of real file — and nothing over about 25 MB reaches us at all, because our mail provider rejects it first.
That ceiling has nothing to do with the 500 MB your plan allows through the website. Convert-by-email is the convenient path for ordinary documents, not the path for large video, and no amount of upgrading changes that.
If a file is too large to email, upload it through the website or the API instead.
When something is wrong
If the subject names no format and you have set no default, if there is no attachment, or if the conversion fails, you get a reply explaining which of those happened. You are never left with silence when we understood who you were.
The one case that is deliberately silent is a message from an address that is not allowed to use your inbox. Replying to it would send our mail to whoever the sender claimed to be.