gzipping metadata files

[David Z Maze]

My setup for Gnus involves using nnml over AFS.  This is fine if I'm
in a place where I have a fast connection to the AFS servers, but not
so good if I'm, say, on a DSL line at home.  In particular, if I've
marked some messages as spam ('S x'), they each get individually moved
to mail.misc.spam, with a corresponding write and fsync of the 800K
.overview file.

I *think* I have transparent gzipping enabled in my XEmacs.  (XEmacs
21.x, both Linux and Solaris.)  Should it Just Work to gzip things
like .newsrc.eld, .bbdb, and Mail/mail/misc/spam/.overview?  (Oh, wow,
and the 8MB .spam-stat.el, too.)  What do I want to make sure I have
enabled?

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
        -- Abra Mitchell