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Network News Transfer Protocol

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Internet protocol suite
Application layer
Transport layer
Internet layer
Link layer

The Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles, as well as transferring news among news servers. Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley completed RFC 977, the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986. Other contributors included Stan Barber from the Baylor College of Medicine and Erik Fair of Apple Computer.

Usenet was originally designed around the UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct computer-to-computer telephone links. Readers and posters would log into the same computers that hosted the servers, reading the articles directly from the local disk.

As local area networks and the Internet became more commonly used, it became desirable to allow newsreaders to be run on personal computers, and a means of employing the Internet to handle article transfers was desired. Because networked Internet-compatible filesystems were not yet widely available, it was decided to develop a new protocol that resembled SMTP, but was tailored for reading newsgroups.

The well-known TCP port 119 is reserved for NNTP. When clients connect to a news server with SSL, TCP port 563 is used. This is sometimes referred to as NNTPS.

The protocol remains in widespread use, and as of 2005 efforts are underway to produce an updated standard. The IMAP protocol can also be used for reading newsgroups.

Network News Reader Protocol

News clients interact with news servers using a subset of NNTP called the Network News Reader Protocol (NNRP). NNRP is the protocol a news client uses to transfer a newly-submitted newsgroup article to a news server. The article subsequently propagates to other news servers via NNTP.

  • Kantor, Brian and Phil Lapsley. RFC 977 "Network News Transfer Protocol: A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based Transmission of News." 1986.
  • Horton, Mark, and R. Adams. RFC 1036 "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages." 1987.
  • Barber, Stan, et al. RFC 2980 "Common NNTP Extensions." 2000
  • IETF nntpext Working Group
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