[Dovecot] compressed IMAP traffic

[Ed W]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Sep 22, 2009, at 9:08 PM, Leonardo Rodrigues wrote:
>
>>   is there anything that can be easily used to automatically compress 
>> IMAP traffic between client and server ? I was thinking if the 
>> SSL/TLS code enables some kind of compression as well.
>
> If your OpenSSL supports it, Dovecot supports it. I recently tested 
> this with gnutls-cli program, openssl s_client for some reason didn't 
> support it. I've no idea if any actual IMAP clients support it.
>

I think this kind of feature is potentially more interesting than people 
give it credit.  Timo, would it be possible to get some additional 
debugging on the SSL connection creation so that we can see if 
compression was enabled?  Packet tracing is all well and good, but can 
be complicated for a non local production server, etc (mine are also 
virtualised machines which also increases the difficulty of packet 
tracing correctly)

It's not really clear why openssl isn't supporting this correctly, but I 
think there is a quite a large performance boost to be had on even 
decently fast broadband connections if this could suddenly start working 
across a wide range of clients...

I would be interested to hear if anyone found there a solution to why 
openssl isn't enabling this compression?

All the best

Ed W