Compressed folders patch for Mutt

The compressed folders patch allows you to access mailbox folders, which are compressed using something like gzip or which are encrypted with something like pgp. For more information how to use this feature, please have a look at the documentation, which is also included in the patch.

Installation:

To apply the patch simply download the patch relating to your Mutt version. Then decompress the patch using the gunzip command, enter your current mutt source directory, and apply the patch using the command `patch -p1' (the -p1 is necessary to apply the changes in the subdirectories correct).

Now you can run 

 ./configure --enable-compressed
or (preferable, but it requires autoconf and automake to be installed) 
 ./prepare --enable-compressed
to configure mutt with compressed folders support and then run `make'. If this fails with an error message, that keymap_defs.h is missing, you can create this file with 
 make keymap_defs.h
If your system complains about a missing aclocal or similar stuff, try to run the following touch-commands (in this order!) before you run `make' and `configure': 
touch configure.in
touch aclocal.m4
touch configure
touch Makefile.in
touch */Makefile.in
touch stamp-h.in

Bugs:

I fear that there are still some bugs or inconsistencies in this code (that's why Thomas Roessler didn't include it into the Mutt distribution yet).

You should not use this patch for incoming mail folders, but only for archive folders, because there is no mechanism yet to synchronize or merge the (temporary) uncompressed folder (which is created while you read the messages in this folder) and the compressed folder where new incoming mail would be appended. This implies, that if you read a compressed folder with Mutt while some other process (either another Mutt process or a mail delivery agent like procmail) writes to this folder, the new mail will be lost. So be careful!

You should not configure mbox_type=maildir, otherwise you cannot create new compressed folders and you can no longer use append-hook.

If you discover other bugs or if you fixed one of the problems, please let me know.

Download:

For released versions:

      For development versions: