Bienvenu’s Thunderbird Blog

Tomorrow’s nightly build of Thunderbird 3.0 b3pre adds support for the IMAP Compress extension – see Bug 401673 and the rfc for more info.  If the server advertises COMPRESS=DEFLATE, we will do compression of incoming and outgoing data. For lower bandwidth connections, this should be a nice win, especially when we select large folders and fetch flags. I’ve seen reports of > 5x compression for the flags response. To turn it off, you can use the config editor to toggle mail.server.default.use_compress_deflate to false.

The latest versions of the Cyrus IMAP server supports COMPRESS=DEFLATE. Fastmail.fm has rolled out this support already.

Many thanks to Bron Gondwana who developed the patch very quickly and cleanly, despite having no experience with the Mozilla codebase.

- David

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.