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If USENET shows us nothing else, it shows us that one really should pay attention in debate class. If not, you're reduced to things such as counting lines in sigs.
— Mike Ellis
NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol, is the protocol used to send Usenet news messages between servers and from a news server to newsreader clients. It is a fairly simple protocol, similar in many ways to POP3 or SMTP and is of interest in part because of its simplicity (it's a lot easier to write one's own NNTP implementation for fun than it is to write one's own IMAP implementation for fun). These pages attempt to gather information about the protocol that may be useful to implementors.
The basic NNTP protocol is documented in RFC 3977, published in October of 2006. This RFC was the culmination of years of work by the NNTP working group of the IETF and replaces RFC 977 published in 1986. Supplementing the new RFC are RFC 4642 on using TLS (SSL) with NNTP, RFC 4643 on NNTP authentication, and RFC 4644 on NNTP extensions for streaming feeds.
The new standard has just been released and the NNTP world changes slowly, so many of its new provisions have not yet been adopted. I'm working, as I have time, on modifying INN to support the new protocols.
For more information on the work of the (now closed) NNTP working group, see my NNTP working group page.
The full set of current NNTP-related RFCs are:
Two related drafts were never published as RFCs but may be of interest:
There is also an IETF working group for the Usenet article format. Also collected on their page are many pointers to other RFCs and documents of interest to Usenet implementors.
For information about NNTP software and pointers to other reference works, see newsreaders.com.
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