The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol 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 was ...

news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, 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 or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

, and Phil Lapsley 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 u ...

, 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 Sc ...

and Erik Fair of

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

. Usenet was originally designed based on the

UUCP UUCP is an acronym of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the ...

network, with most article transfers taking place over direct point-to-point telephone links between news servers, which were powerful

time-sharing system In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence a ...

s. 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 larger ...

s and

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

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 typic ...

(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 distin ...

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 secu ...

(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 InterNetNews (INN) is a Usenet news server package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX conference in San Antonio, Texas. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP functionality. While p ...

'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 ''Leafnode'' is a store-and-forward Network News Transfer Protocol, NNTP (or Usenet) proxy server designed for small sites with just a few active newsgroups, but very easy to set up and maintain, when compared to InterNetNews, INN. Originally cre ...

C News C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C. Functionally, the operati ...

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 Software ...

* Synchronet * yProxy

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 Application layer protocols Internet Standards Usenet

Network News Reader Protocol

NNTP server software

See also

External links