Subject: [lemonade] Compression

From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 23:45:54 +0100

Hiya folks,

I'm currently using COMPRESS=DEFLATE in normal usage, and it's 
compressing my download stream to 35-40% of the original size. This 
is remarkably good compression, and it's worth noting this is mostly 
compressing the IMAP protocol stream, rather than body parts - where 
body parts are being compressed, they're quite small textual parts, 
often quoting previous ones, which helps.

I've also been doing some experimentation based on supplying a 
URLAUTH URL to the message I'm replying to during Submission, which 
is then used to prime compression - this is actually using an 
application-level stream compression in ESMTP, an analogue of 
COMPRESS=DEFLATE.

Because of the quoted parts, this means that while simple compression 
reduces the data to 50.0%, this method can reduce it to 36.6% 
including transmission of the URLAUTH, which itself accounts for 23% 
of the actual transmission, on average. I suspect that in the editing 
draft case with CATENATE, this might be more effective, but draft 
editing is considerably harder to simulate, especially as I don't 
have the data to use.

I think this is actually worth implementing - although the saving 
isn't huge, it's nevertheless allowing to send 3 emails instead of 2, 
roughly, and it's fairly easy to implement.

Dave.
-- 
           You see things; and you say "Why?"
   But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
    - George Bernard Shaw

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