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Re: [ietf-smtp] Compressing SMTP streams

2016-01-29 01:57:30
Brandon Long writes:
Has there been any previous discussion on having a COMPRESS like extension for SMTP?

The matter was discussed at an eatery across the street from an IETF venue a few hours after IMAP COMPRESS had been discussed at the meeting. Summary: SMTP has less upside than IMAP in terms of compression ratio and is more difficult since there are so many implementations, "so let's do just IMAP".

At the moment I think there are many more SMTP implementations than TLS implementations, so reaching critical mass on TLS might be easier.

As for my reasoning, at least for us:

1) CPU is cheaper than bandwidth
2) message sizes are increasing, but base64 isn't going away

Theoretically, switching to some combination 8BITMIME, CONTENTBINARY and BDAT, we'd save nearly as much bandwidth since a good fraction of the compression is going to be recovering the base64 encoding overhead on attachment types that aren't likely to compress much.

Announce that messages to gmail from compressing clients will get a bonus by your spam filter, and wide deployment will follow overnight ;)

Arnt

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