Most documents go through Hemma without you ever thinking about limits. But a few will hit one. This article tells you which ones and what to do about it.
File types: PDF, JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP. That covers every invoice, quote, permit, plan, photo, and scan you are likely to receive from a contractor or municipality.
Size: up to 10 MB per file.
Anything that is not on that list does not get processed. Spreadsheets, Word docs, ZIP archives, executables, calendar invites — all skipped. The original is not stored, and you do not see them in your project.
A contractor sending you an Excel quote? Ask them to export it as PDF before sending. Most accounting tools have a one-click PDF export.
PDFs and images are the formats that survive contact with reality. Every accounting tool exports PDF. Every phone takes JPEG or HEIC photos. Every scanner produces PDF. They are also the only formats Hemma's AI can read reliably — a spreadsheet's structured data needs a different pipeline that we have not built.
Limiting to these two formats is also a small security choice. Spreadsheets and Word documents can carry macros. PDFs and images cannot run code. So Hemma never asks itself "is this attachment hostile?" — it just rejects everything that could be.
Each rejected attachment shows up on the message detail page with the reason. You see exactly what was skipped, so nothing disappears silently.
The reasons you might see:
.pdf) but the content is something else. Usually a corrupt download from a sender's email client. Ask for a re-send.Every inbound email goes through a security pre-screen before Hemma processes anything. The body is scored by an AI for prompt-injection and content-manipulation risk on a 0–10 scale. Anything scoring 7 or higher is dropped as malicious.
Attachments go through a separate validation pipeline:
.pdf that is actually an executable gets blocked here.You do not configure any of this. It just runs.
You will not see flagged-malicious messages in your senders list either. Anything Hemma considers dangerous is dropped before any approve-or-reject decision happens.
My contractor sent a 25 MB photo. Can I get it through? Resize it before forwarding. On a Mac, open the image in Preview and pick Tools → Adjust Size. On Windows, the Photos app has the same. Most modern phones already produce sub-10 MB images by default.
Can I increase the limit for my project? No. The 10 MB cap is global. It is a balance between covering 99% of real documents and keeping email processing fast and reliable.
Where do I see what got blocked? On the detail page of any message you forwarded, the rejected attachments are listed with their reason. Nothing is hidden.