The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...

used for transporting

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications.

Brian Kantor The AMPRNet (AMateur Packet Radio Network) or Network 44 is used in amateur radio for packet radio and digital communications between computer networks managed by amateur radio operators. Like other amateur radio frequency allocations, an IP ...

of the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is ...

, and

Phil Lapsley Philip D. Lapsley (born 1965) is an electrical engineer, hacker, author and entrepreneur. Early life Lapsley attended the University of California, Berkeley in the 1980s, graduating with a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering and computer scie ...

of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, wrote , the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986. Other contributors included Stan O. Barber from the

Baylor College of Medicine Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a medical school and research center in Houston, Texas, within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. BCM is composed of four academic components: the School of Medicine, the Graduate S ...

and Erik Fair of

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. Usenet was originally designed based on the UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct point-to-point telephone links between news servers, which were powerful time-sharing systems. Readers and posters logged into these computers reading the articles directly from the local disk. As

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a large ...

s and

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participation proliferated, it became desirable to allow newsreaders to be run on personal computers connected to local networks. The resulting protocol was NNTP, which resembled the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) but was tailored for exchanging

newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically disti ...

articles. A newsreader, also known as a news client, is a software application that reads articles on Usenet, either directly from the news server's disks or via the NNTP. The well-known TCP port 119 is reserved for NNTP. Well-known TCP port 433 (NNSP) may be used when doing a bulk transfer of articles from one server to another. When clients connect to a news server with

Transport Layer Security Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...

(TLS), TCP port 563 is often used. This is sometimes referred to as NNTPS. Alternatively, a plain-text connection over port 119 may be changed to use TLS via the STARTTLS command. In October 2006, the IETF released which updates NNTP and codifies many of the additions made over the years since RFC 977. At the same time, the IETF also released which specifies the use of

(TLS) via NNTP over STARTTLS.

Network News Reader Protocol

During an abortive attempt to update the NNTP standard in the early 1990s, a specialized form of NNTP intended specifically for use by clients, NNRP, was proposed. This protocol was never completed or fully implemented, but the name persisted in InterNetNews's (INN) ''nnrpd'' program. As a result, the subset of standard NNTP commands useful to clients is sometimes still referred to as "NNRP".

NNTP server software

* Leafnode * InterNetNews * C News *

Apache James Apache James, a.k.a. Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server or some variation thereof, is an open source SMTP and POP3 mail transfer agent and NNTP news server written entirely in Java. James is maintained by contributors to the Apache Softwar ...

* Synchronet * yProxy

External links

* Kantor, Brian and

. "Network News Transfer Protocol: A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News." 1986. * Horton, Mark, and R. Adams. "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages." 1987. * Barber, Stan, et al. "Common NNTP Extensions." 2000
IETF nntpext Working Group
* Feather, Clive. "Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)." 2006 * Murchison, K., J. Vinocur, and C. Newman. "Using Transport Layer Security (TLS) with Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)" 2006 * * {{Usenetnav Application layer protocols Internet Standards Usenet

Network News Reader Protocol

NNTP server software

See also

External links