I thought this was a simple google search, but apparently I'm wrong on that. I've seen that you should supply: Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=0,deflate;q=0 in the request headers. However, the article that suggested it also noted that proxies routinely ignore that header. Also, when I supplied it to nginx, it still compressed the response message body. http://forgetmenotes.blogspot.ca/2009/05/how-to-disable-gzip-compression-in.html So, how do I tell a web server to disable compression on the response message body? Chawathe Vipul Do you wish encoding to be disabled altogether? Then skip the Accept