Compression and Encryption — Built Into Email### Foxy Mail automatically compresses and encrypts messages — without asking users to understand either technology
The web has compressed text before sending it for nearly 30 years.
You open a page. Your browser and the web server agree on a compression format. The server compresses the data, the browser decompresses it, and you never have to think about any of it.
This saves bandwidth, speeds up transfers, and reduces the amount of data that has to be moved around the internet.
Email could work the same way. Yet in practice, most email is still transferred and stored without modern content compression.
Foxy Mail changes that.
Compression without a “Compress” button
When two Foxy Mail clients communicate, they automatically determine whether compression is supported. If it is, the message is compressed with Zstandard — better known as ZST — before it is sent.
The receiving client decompresses it automatically.
There is no setting to find, no archive to create, and no ZIP attachment for the recipient to open. Users simply write and read email as usual.
Depending on the content, this can reduce the space and bandwidth required by approximately 25% or more. Plain text, HTML, logs, and other text-heavy content often benefit considerably more. Files that are already compressed, such as JPEG images, videos, or ZIP archives, naturally offer less room for further reduction.
The important part is that the user does not need to make that decision. The clients handle it.
Encryption has been available for just as long
End-to-end encryption for email is not a new idea either.
PGP has existed since 1991. S/MIME also dates back to the 1990s. Both proved that email can be encrypted so that only the sender and recipient can read it.
But they never became a normal part of everyday email.
The problem was not the encryption itself. The problem was everything users were expected to understand and manage around it: public and private keys, certificates, fingerprints, key exchange, trust, backups, and expiration.
For experts, that may be manageable. For everyone else, it is the reason encrypted email remained a special feature instead of becoming the default.
AES-256 — handled by the clients
Foxy Mail takes the same approach to encryption that browsers took to web compression: let the software handle the technical details.
Compatible Foxy Mail clients negotiate end-to-end encryption automatically and protect the message using AES-256. Users do not have to generate, export, import, compare, or manually exchange keys.
They write an email and press Send.
The recipient opens it normally.
The complicated part happens between the clients, where it belongs.
Old ideas, finally made practical
Neither compression nor encryption is new. That is precisely the point.
These are established technologies that have been available since the 1990s. The web made automatic compression invisible to users and gained enormous efficiency from it. Email encryption existed too, but its complexity prevented it from reaching ordinary users.
Foxy Mail brings both ideas together:
- Zstandard compression to reduce storage and bandwidth
- AES-256 end-to-end encryption to protect message content
- Automatic negotiation between compatible clients
- No manual key exchange
- No additional steps for the sender or recipient Technology becomes useful when people no longer have to think about it.
Email should have worked this way all along.
