[Dovecot] compressed IMAP traffic

[Ed W]

Leonardo Rodrigues wrote:
>
>    When searching for that, i found that there's already a RFC for a 
> COMPRESS imap extension ... as imagined, there are pretty few clients 
> that supports it .... Thunderbird 3 Beta supports it .... but asking 
> customers to use a Beta software is not acceptable. So, we'll probably 
> need some more years to have this extensions widely deployed and 
> supported by clients.

I'm prepared to be wrong, but my guess would be that the SSL way will 
give you 90-110% of the performance of this extension...  The benefit of 
the COMPRESS extension is likely to be that it doesn't require SSL, and 
perhaps there are some corner cases where performance can be improved 
through knowledge of the data, but I bet that takes another 10 years to 
filter through...

Don't get me wrong, I build email compression software as my main 
product (!!), however you can really only fiddle around with an extra 
10-40% of compression between the best and worst algorithm, and for sure 
that's nice to have, but you get a 500% speedup in many cases just by 
enabling "something" with a decent sized dictionary!


Cheers

Ed W