If you run a mailing list, you may wish to make the archives of that list available to the public. If you have a slow connection to the Internet, and the list archives are large, people may not be able to download the archive files effectively.
The Obscure Organization hosts the JavaScript Mailing List, a fairly high-traffic list. In February of 1996, this list generated about 1.8MB of traffic. People could not download the whole archive effectively, because their Web browsers would time out before the download completed.
To fix this problem, I created a perl script called compress-majordomo-archive.pl.
This script is also available via ftp from ftp://ftp.obscure.org/pub/compress-majordomo-archive.pl.
This script is designed to be run on a monthly basis from cron.
This current version of this script is 0.1.