The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

news articles (''netnews'') between

news server A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers. Articles an ...

s, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

, and Phil Lapsley of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

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

Baylor College of Medicine The Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a private medical school in Houston, Texas, United States. Originally as the Baylor University College of Medicine from 1903 to 1969, the college became independent with the current name and has been se ...

and Erik Fair of

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

. Usenet was originally designed based on the

UUCP UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...

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, campus, or building, and has its network equipment and interconnects locally managed. LANs facilitate the distribution of da ...

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 The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typ ...

(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 not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start ...

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, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over ...

(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 Transport Layer Security (TLS) via NNTP over

STARTTLS Opportunistic TLS (Transport Layer Security) refers to extensions in plain text communication protocols, which offer a way to upgrade a plain text connection to an encrypted ( TLS or SSL) connection instead of using a separate port for encrypted ...

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, or Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server, is an open source SMTP and POP3 mail transfer agent written entirely in Java. James is maintained by contributors to the Apache Software Foundation, with initial contributions by Serge K ...

* Synchronet * yProxy * DIABLO, a backbone news transit system, designed to replace INND on backbone machines.

References

Application layer protocols Internet Standards Usenet

External links

* Kantor, Brian and Phil Lapsley. "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

Network News Reader Protocol

NNTP server software

See also

References

External links