Send to Kindle not working with a PDF

Find your symptom

Limits checked on Amazon’s pages on 4 Nov 2026.

1. Nothing arrives after you email it

Every Kindle and Kindle app on your account has its own Send to Kindle email address, and Amazon only accepts mail to it from addresses you have approved. You can approve up to 15 senders. Amazon’s help page lists four conditions for delivery:

1. The sender’s address is on your Approved Personal Document Email List, which you manage on Amazon’s Manage Your Content and Devices page.
2. The document is a supported file type.
3. The document is attached to the email, not pasted in as a link.
4. The device is connected to the internet.

A common trap is sending from a second address, such as a work account or a phone’s mail app set up with a different email, that was never approved.

Amazon keeps trying for up to 60 days, so a Kindle that was in airplane mode will collect the file once it connects.

2. The email is too big

Amazon caps an email at 50 MB in total and 25 attachments. Scanned books pass 50 MB easily, because each page is stored as a photo. Many mail providers set their own attachment limit too, and it may be lower than Amazon’s.

You have two ways round it:

• Use the website. The Send to Kindle page takes files up to 200 MB. Turn on “Add to your library” if you want it on every device.
• Make the PDF smaller. See PDF too big for Kindle for what shrinks a scan without blurring it.

Amazon also says you can put several documents in a ZIP to send more at once. That helps with many small files. It does little for one large scan, because the page images inside a PDF are already compressed.

3. The file type isn’t accepted

Amazon’s list of supported types includes PDF, EPUB, RTF, TXT, HTML and the common image formats. It doesn’t list DjVu, CBZ, CBR or MOBI. If your book is a .djvu, convert it to PDF first with DjVu to PDF.

Check the file really is what its name says, too. A download that ends in .pdf but won’t open on your computer either is damaged, and no route will deliver it.

4. It arrived on the wrong device

Each device and app has its own address. If you emailed your phone’s Kindle app address, the book goes there. With the website route, the “Add to your library” option puts the document in your Kindle library so any device on your account can download it.

5. It arrived, but you can’t read it

This one isn’t a Send to Kindle failure, though it’s the most common reason people think it’s broken. A scanned PDF shows each page as a picture, shrunk to fit the screen. On a 6 or 7-inch Kindle that means:

• text smaller than in the printed book, inside wide margins
• grey or yellowed paper that looks faint on e-ink
• no way to search, highlight or look up a word
• a heavy file that can be slow to open

None of these change by sending it another way. They change when the file itself is fixed: margins cropped for the whole book, paper turned white and print black, and searchable text added under each page. That is what FixMyScan does, and you get back a PDF to send through the same routes above.

A note for Kindle Scribe owners

If you want to write on the PDF, how you load it matters. Amazon says handwriting isn’t supported in PDFs loaded over USB-C, so send it through Send to Kindle instead. A file over 200 MB can’t go through the website, which is one more reason to get the size down first.

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