ietf-smtp
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Re: compressed content-transfer-encoding?

1999-07-28 17:46:19
my point is that even the "type-independent compressions" (LZW,
deflate, etc)  are at best ineffective (and at worse pessimal)
when applied to different kinds of media types for which they
were designed.  you therefore don't want to gratuitously apply
them to random content-types.

Actually this isn't true -- for one thing, there's still an advantage to 
be had by compressing base64 at the transport level. 

right, but I was talking about MIME compression. if we compress at
the transport level, we might as well just use ssl.

And for another, the
type-independent conversions sometimes do manage to squeeze a little 
more juice out out that the type-specific conversions didn't manage. 

yes, though it's often prety marginal - my guess is that it's not worth
the cost of incompatibility.  (again, talking about MIME compression)

And when that's not
possible, they are smart enough to tell this is the case and opt out; the
result is a little CPU lost on the sending side (very cheap), effectively no
bloat, and no significant CPU loss on the receiver.

basically true, for newer algorithms.

Keith