Hello, something that can be very useful for me is a gzip feature.
Since zlib 1.2.1 seems to be supporting that now, look at http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ , $compress can easily have a extra flag to select gzip or zlib. (if the compress method is zlib, i know it is also used for the png files)
like -z and - g

please

since no one replied to your post, I'll just tack on my official endorsement for this suggestion. sounds good to me.

Sounds reasonable to me as well, though I have never used mIRC to zip anything (so far, anyway!).