The
Network News Transfer Protocol (
NNTP) is an
Internet application
protocol used for transporting
Usenet news articles (
netnews) between
news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the
University of California, San Diego and
Phil Lapsley of the
University of California, Berkeley authored 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 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 networks and
Internet participation proliferated, it became desirable to allow
newsreaders to be run on personal computers connected to local networks. Because distributed file systems were not yet widely available, a new protocol was developed based on the
client-server model. It resembled the
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), but was tailored for exchanging
newsgroup articles.
A newsreader, also known as a news client, is an application software that reads articles on Usenet (generally known as newsgroup), either directly from the news server's disks or via the NNTP.
The
well-known TCP port 119 is reserved for NNTP. When clients connect to a news server with
Transport Layer Security (TLS), TCP port 563 is used. This is sometimes referred to as
NNTPS.
In October 2006, the IETF released RFC 3977 which updates the NNTP protocol and codifies many of the additions made over the years since RFC 977. The
IMAP protocol can also be used for reading newsgroups.
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".
See also
