Microsoft KB Archive/233386

= XGEN: Data Compression on the Windows 2000 SMTP Server =

Article ID: 233386

Article Last Modified on 2/26/2007

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q233386



SUMMARY
The Microsoft Windows 2000 SMTP server does not provide options for data compression primarily for the following reasons:
 * Because no pre-Windows 2000 SMTP servers support compression, it would lead to interoperability issues.
 * Compression overhead would tax the CPU of the server and reduce performance more than would be gained in network bandwidth by compression.



MORE INFORMATION
Windows 2000 SMTP server supports the Transport Layer Security (TLS) extension to SMTP. TLS, more commonly known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is a popular mechanism for enhancing TCP communications with privacy and authentication.

TLS is normally used for its encryption layer and also has a compression layer (encryption is usually more secure if the data is not plain text, and one way to make it unpredictable is to compress it before encryption). However, most TLS implementations use a "null" compression provider.

The existence of the unused TLS compression layer provides the possibility of adding a compression provider to our TLS support.

Keywords: kbinfo KB233386

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