[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[Scott Howard]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 03:49:30PM -0500, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 02:46:52PM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > I installed mod_gzip.  Works *great*, has reduced my web bandwidth use a
> > bit.  Why hasnt someone created something like this for email?  Could
> > be a SMTP option, to gzip the mail streams on the fly...
> 
> I'd love for mutt to gzip it's mbox files.  Not entirely related, but still.

http://www.spinnaker.de/mutt/compressed/

One useful thing about gzip compression is that you can just concat two
gzip'ed files, and get a valid compressed file.  This means that to append
a new message to a file, you don't need to read the existing  file at all,
you just compress the new message in isolation, and append it to the end of
the file.


<<scott at milliways /tmp>> cat f1
test file 1
<<scott at milliways /tmp>> cat f2
test file 2
<<scott at milliways /tmp>> gzip f1 f2
<<scott at milliways /tmp>> gzcat f1
test file 1
<<scott at milliways /tmp>> gzcat f2
test file 2
<<scott at milliways /tmp>> cat f1.gz f2.gz > f3.gz
<<scott at milliways /tmp>> gzcat f3.gz
test file 1
test file 2
<<scott at milliways /tmp>>

  Scott.