Brad Bateman wrote:
  

Colons are a reserved
    

Um, sure, a colon is not a period, sorry.

  

character in the DOS world.  Yes....I thought about encapsulating (gzip)
but was looking for a more elegant solution.
    

Maildir standard uses colons as a separator so I'm afraid that archive
is the only way to go. I'm not sure if gzip is the best format as it
compresses data and doesn't support storing multiple files in a big one.
I'd suggest tar.

Cheers,
-jkt