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Re: [ietf-smtp] Compressing SMTP streams

2016-01-29 00:18:20
Has there been any previous discussion on having a COMPRESS like extension
for SMTP?

Now and then, but the general feeling has been that it's not worth it.

I was hoping we could get this for free with TLS, but few libraries
implement it and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME seems to have made
them leary about it.  I don't think SMTP is implicated because it doesn't
use cookies/etc, but anyways.

I agree that the CRIME cookie issue seems irrelevant to SMTP since
there isn't any context saved from one session to the next.  TLS has
had perfectly good compression features defined for over a decade, so
I'd rather that we encourage people to use those rather than invent
yet another layer of goop for SMTP.

It looks to me like openssl includes the compression code, and a lot
of mail software uses openssl, so it might be an interesting
experiment to try enabling it in some SMTP clients and see how many
servers are willing to do it.

R's,
John

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