| < Netnews Standards | Russ Allbery > Usenet Format and Protocols |
The following Internet-Drafts have been published via the IETF process to document different aspects of the Netnews article format or protocols. The information here copies information also available from the IETF Internet-Draft Archive Tool, but focuses only on drafts related to the Usenet article format.
Follow the IETF link for each draft to see all historic versions available from the IETF archive and diffs between versions.
Also see the NNTP Drafts for Internet-Drafts related to the NNTP protocol.
The following drafts were generated as part of the official work of the IETF USEFOR working group. The working group has since closed, and it's unclear if these drafts will be pursued further.
This Draft is intended to become a "Best Current Practice" RFC. Its purpose is to set out how software should behave and conventions which users should observe, in order that Netnews in general, and Usenet in particular, should provide the most effective service to its users.
| draft-ietf-usefor-useage-01.txt | 2005-03 | 104KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-useage-00.txt | 2004-05 | 94KiB |
Message-ID headers are used to uniquely identify Internet messages. Having a unique identifier for each message has many benefits, including ease in the following of threads and intelligent scoring of messages based on threads to which they belong. It has been suggested that it is impossible for client software to be able to generate globally-unique Message-IDs. We believe this to be incorrect, and herein to offer suggestions for generating unique Message-IDs.
This work was never fully adopted by the working group. It would be material for a best practices document, which was postponed until after the standards-track documents were completed.
| draft-ietf-usefor-message-id-01.txt | 1998-07 | 8KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-message-id-00.txt | 1998-06 | 6KiB |
[RFC822] and [RFC1036] define so-called 'Message-IDs' that represent a unique identifier for email and netnews messages. A similar identifier is also used by [RFC2045] for the 'Content-ID' label. For each of these protocols, uniqueness of the identifiers generated is more or less essential. Unfortunately, the original Message-ID specification requires that the generator have an own, non-temporary full qualified domain name available, which does not allow hosts that are connected via dialup lines and get dynamically assigned IP addresses (and hostnames) to generate unique IDs offline. This memo provides recommendations for the generation of such IDs without risking non-uniqueness.
This draft was published as an alternative approach to "Recommendations for Generating Message IDs" above. This work was never fully adopted by the working group. It would be material for a best practices document, which was postponed until after the standards-track documents were completed.
| draft-ietf-usefor-msg-id-alt-00.txt | 1998-09-06 | 19KiB |
This draft defines a format to be used when delivering a single message to multiple destinations, where some destinations are newsgroups and some destinations are email mailboxes.
This work was discussed heavily in the working group, but was never included in the base article format standard.
| draft-ietf-usefor-posted-mailed-01.txt | 1998-07 | 26KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-posted-mailed-00.txt | 1998-06 | 27KiB |
The following drafts were submitted by individuals outside of the official work of the IETF USEFOR working group, but are relevant or related to the work of the working group or to Netnews article formats.
This document describes the "OpenPGP" mail and news header field. The field provide information about the sender's OpenPGP key.
A new header field intended for use in both mail and news. I haven't noticed these in the wild, but I might not.
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-07.txt | 2014-08-28 | 20KiB |
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-06.txt | 2008-05-20 | 22KiB |
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-05.txt | 2008-04-15 | 22KiB |
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-04.txt | 2008-04-02 | 20KiB |
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-03.txt | 2008-02-23 | 21KiB |
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-02.txt | 2005-09-23 | 20KiB |
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-01.txt | 2005-05-25 | 19KiB |
| draft-josefsson-openpgp-mailnews-header-00.txt | 2005-01-07 | 19KiB |
Traditional Network News (Netnews) systems handle only ASCII characters in newsgroup names used in NNTP commands and message headers.
This memo defines an extension to allow Internationalised Newsgroup Names, the characters of which can be drawn from the large Unicode repertoire, based on the Extending IDNA to Other Protocols (X-IDNA) base specification.
This is an odd draft since it seems to be unaware of the allowances for Unicode in newsgroup names in the NNTP standard, and of existing experiments with using Unicode directly in group names. I don't know if it's being pursued.
| draft-teint-xidna-newsgroup-00.txt | 2010-03-23 | 12KiB |
This document defines the initial IANA registration for permanent Netnews message header fields. This document was never published as an RFC, but the registrations are present in the IANA registry.
This proposal was made obsolete by RFC 3864, which deals with the same problem but has a broader scope.
| draft-lindsey-hdrreg-netnews-01.txt | 2004-07-05 | 22KiB |
| draft-lindsey-hdrreg-netnews-00.txt | 2004-04-19 | 20KiB |
This document describes the proper methods to use when replying to messages in a One to Many communication environment such as USENET, mailing lists, or bulletin boards. It is recommended that top-posting in a summary reply be used primarily, or if desired and appropriate that inline-posting or conversational-posting be used in a point-by-point reply.
This is an etiquette best practice proposal that was never adopted and integrated into an RFC so far as I know. It deals mostly with quoting issues.
| draft-bambenek-posting-guidelines-03.txt | 2004-05 | 13KiB |
| draft-bambenek-posting-guidelines-02.txt | 2002-02 | 13KiB |
| draft-bambenek-posting-guidelines-01.txt | 2002-02 | 11KiB |
| draft-bambenek-posting-guidelines-00.txt | 2002-02 | 8KiB |
This document describes a possible architecture for the implementation of internationalised email addresses, newsgroup names, and similar identifiers on top of the standards set by the Internationalised Domain Names [IDN] working group.
One of the many rounds of work on internationalization. This one proposes using the IDN mechanism developed for domain names for newsgroup names as well (among other things). This work seems to live on in "An X-IDNA Profile for Network News Group Names" discussed above.
| draft-faerber-i18n-email-netnews-names-00.txt | 2002-08 | 13KiB |
This memo specifies extensions to e-mail and netnews standards, to allow for the submission of translations of messages, not only at initial submission time, but also at later time, and made by other translators than the original author of the message. Three new e-mail/netnews header fields are proposed, "Content-Translation-Of, "Content-Translator" and "Translation-Request".
This is primarily an email extension, but would have defined new headers for netnews articles as well.
| draft-palme-e-mail-translation-04.txt | 2002-05 | 50KiB |
| draft-palme-e-mail-translation-03.txt | 2001-12 | 47KiB |
| draft-palme-e-mail-translation-02.txt | 2000-12 | 36KiB |
| draft-palme-e-mail-translation-01.txt | 2000-11 | 38KiB |
| draft-palme-e-mail-translation-00.txt | 1999-04 | 13KiB |
This document provides a cryptographically secure means whereby it can be established beyond doubt that relevant headers of a Netnews article or an Email message have not been tampered with in transit, and that they were indeed originated by the person purporting to have done so. It seeks to supplement, rather than to supplant, the existing protocols for signing the bodies of articles and messages.
This was a proposal by Charles Lindsey for how to add cryptographic signatures to netnews articles. This work, with the other security work, was never picked up by the working group due to lack of resources.
| draft-lindsey-usefor-signed-01.txt | 2001-09 | 76KiB |
| draft-lindsey-usefor-signed-00.txt | 2000-05 | 65KiB |
The present document suggests a simple alternative to much of the complexity in the Path and Injector-Info headers introduced in [1]. The Complaints-To header introduced in [1] and the NNTP-Posting-Host header introduced in [NNTP] are also replaced. The replacement suggested tries to pay due attention to posters' privacy, and at the same time provides a robust means to trace, correlate and prosecute abusive behaviour.
This was an alternative proposal by Thomas Roessler replacing Injection-Info and related headers, offered as part of the working group discussion about those headers. For some reason, it doesn't appear to be available from the IETF Internet-Draft archive.
| draft-roessler-usefor-trace-00.txt | 2001-04 | 16KiB |
We attempt to design an extensible parallel distributed client-server customizable profiles-based ratings system with as many buzzwords as possible. Additionally the system should be capable of amassing, tracking and indexing other Netnews/Internet "metadata" -- any data about netnews articles or Internet resources other than the articles/ resources themselves.
These drafts are more a discussion of an idea than an actual protocol specification. I don't know of any implementation of this specific system, but GroupLens and NoCeM are both similar ideas.
| draft-hanson-nnmp-01.txt | 1999-09-16 | 13KiB |
| draft-hanson-nnmp-00.txt | 1999-07-04 | 11KiB |
Introduces one new e-mail header, Supersedes.
This was based on the Supersedes header defined for Netnews, which is why I included it in this list. It uses the new Supersedes syntax, which ended up not being adopted by Netnews. This draft was split out of draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields, described below.
| draft-palme-supersedes-00.txt | 1999-02 | 16KiB |
Introduces two new e-mail headers, Auto-Submitted and Expires.
Earlier revisions included Supersedes, which was split into a separate draft archived above. Even earlier versions proposed an Obsoletes header that became Supersedes.
The IETF archive doesn't have an -01 version of this document for some reason.
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-15.txt | 1999-02 | 21KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-14.txt | 1998-11 | 27KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-13.txt | 1998-07 | 26KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-12.txt | 1998-01 | 25KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-11.txt | 1997-11 | 20KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-10.txt | 1997-09 | 19KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-09.txt | 1997-08 | 17KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-08.txt | 1997-07 | 17KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-07.txt | 1997-05 | 12KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-06.txt | 1997-01 | 11KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-05.txt | 1996-07 | 11KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-04.txt | 1996-05 | 11KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-03.txt | 1996-01 | 9KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-02.txt | 1995-11 | 10KiB |
| draft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-00.txt | 1995-02 | 7KiB |
Separate Internets standards documents define the e-mail headers In-Reply-To, References, Supersedes and Expires. This document, which is an informational RFC, gives some advice on the implementation of these features.
Some fairly minimal advice on the implementation of these specific headers. Only a historical curiosity. (It of course never became an informational RFC.)
| draft-palme-newfields-info-02.txt | 1998-11 | 10KiB |
| draft-palme-newfields-info-01.txt | 1998-03 | 10KiB |
| draft-palme-newfields-info-00.txt | 1997-07 | 7KiB |
Various IETF standards and http, e-mail and netnews software products use various http, e-mail and netnews header fields. This document specifies a procedure for the registration of http, e-mail and netnews header field names, to reduce the risk that two different products use the same header field name in different ways (homonyms) or that several different header field names are used with identical meaning (synonyms).
Another early attempt at specifying a mail and news header registry, also made obsolete by RFC 3864. This draft was submitted as part of the DRUMS work, which was the working group that was responsible for the RFC 2821 and RFC 2822 email standards.
(There is a bug in the IETF Internet-Draft archive for this draft that causes the -04 version to be returned by searches but 404 when you attempt to retrieve it. The IETF does have version -03 and earlier.)
| draft-ietf-drums-MHRegistry-04.txt | 1998-01 | 32KiB |
| draft-ietf-drums-MHRegistry-03.txt | 1998-01 | 32KiB |
| draft-ietf-drums-MHRegistry-02.txt | 1997-11 | 24KiB |
| draft-ietf-drums-MHRegistry-01.txt | 1997-08 | 22KiB |
| draft-ietf-drums-MHRegistry-00.txt | 1997-01 | 30KiB |
Messages can be transported through gateways between email and netnews. Combined clients for mail and netnews can submit the same message at the same time to email and netnews. Many netnews clients can produce email replies to the author of netnews articles. This standard specifies how to handle these kinds of messages. This standard specifies three new email headers: 'Posted-To', 'Group-Reply-To' and 'Personal-Reply-To'.
An early attempt to describe and standardize gatewaying. This is very hard. I tried to write up some rules for it as part of the USEFOR work, but never reached a satisfying description of what to do.
| draft-palme-newsmail-00.txt | 1997-08 | 30KiB |
The following drafts are earlier versions of documents that eventually published as RFCs, generally as part of the official work of the IETF USEFOR working group.
This document specifies the syntax of Netnews articles in the context of the "Internet Message Format" (RFC 2822) and "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)" (RFC 2045). This document obsoletes RFC 1036, providing an updated specification to reflect current practice and incorporating incremental changes specified in other documents.
This document was published as RFC 5536.
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-12.txt | 2007-01-08 | 74KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-11.txt | 2006-10-04 | 74KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-10.txt | 2006-09-17 | 74KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-09.txt | 2006-08-28 | 83KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-08.txt | 2006-05-22 | 79KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-07.txt | 2006-03-05 | 79KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-06.txt | 2005-12-16 | 67KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-05.txt | 2005-07-08 | 61KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-04.txt | 2005-05-24 | 57KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-03.txt | 2005-04-06 | 53KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-02.txt | 2004-11-23 | 51KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-01.txt | 2004-09-14 | 39KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-00.txt | 2004-07-11 | 31KiB |
This document defines the architecture of Netnews systems and specifies the correct manipulation and interpretation of Netnews articles by software which originates, distributes, stores, and displays them. It also specifies the requirements that must be met by any protocol used to transport and serve Netnews articles.
This document was published as RFC 5537.
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-14.txt | 2009-03-03 | 117KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-13.txt | 2008-12-14 | 118KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-12.txt | 2008-08-27 | 115KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-11.txt | 2008-08-22 | 111KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-10.txt | 2008-08-03 | 107KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-09.txt | 2007-11-10 | 104KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-08.txt | 2007-07-01 | 104KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-07.txt | 2007-01-03 | 103KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-06.txt | 2006-11 | 146KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-05.txt | 2006-01 | 143KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-04.txt | 2005-07 | 148KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-03.txt | 2005-02 | 142KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-02.txt | 2004-12 | 141KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-01.txt | 2004-09 | 135KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-00.txt | 2004-08 | 126KiB |
This Standard defines the format of Netnews articles and specifies the requirements to be met by software which originates, distributes, stores and displays them.
This draft was split into -usefor (article format), -usepro (article transmission and manipulation), and -useage (best practices) after the -13 release. Its successor drafts are listed above.
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-13.txt | 2004-05 | 251KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-12.txt | 2003-11 | 254KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-11.txt | 2003-06 | 256KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-10.txt | 2003-04 | 285KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-09.txt | 2003-02 | 315KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-08.txt | 2002-08 | 306KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-07.txt | 2002-05 | 297KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-06.txt | 2001-11 | 259KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-05.txt | 2001-07 | 278KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-04.txt | 2001-04 | 261KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-03.txt | 2000-02 | 213KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-02.txt | 1999-03 | 175KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-01.txt | 1998-08 | 156KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-00.txt | 1998-05 | 147KiB |
This document defines the architecture of Netnews systems and specifies the correct manipulation and interpretation of Netnews articles by software which originates, distributes, stores, and displays them. It also specifies the requirements that must be met by any protocol used to transport and serve Netnews articles.
This was my proposal to replace the original "Netnews Architecture and Protocols" draft. It became the basis of draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-07 and later.
| draft-allbery-usefor-usepro-00.txt | 2006-11-30 | 99KiB |
This document defines the format and procedures for interchange of network news articles. It updates and obsoletes RFC 1036, in particular adding support for internationalization of headers and message bodies and multimedia support in message bodies. It does this in a manner designed to maximize backward compatibility with news and mail servers, gateways, and user agents.
This was a proposal by Dan Kohn for an alternate format and presentation of the article format draft and became one of the foundations for "Netnews Article Format" above.
| draft-kohn-news-article-03.txt | 2003-03-27 | 29KiB |
| draft-kohn-news-article-02.txt | 2003-03-19 | 30KiB |
| draft-kohn-news-article-01.txt | 2003-02-18 | 28KiB |
| draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt | 2003-02-01 | 20KiB |
By the early 1990s it had become clear that RFC 1036, the then specification for the Interchange of USENET Messages, was badly in need of repair. This "INTERNET DRAFT to be", though never formally published at that time, was widely circulated and became the de facto standard for implementors of News Servers and User Agents, rapidly acquiring the nickname "Son of 1036". Indeed, under that name, it could fairly be described as the best-known Internet Draft (n)ever published, and it formed the starting point for the recently adopted Proposed Standards for Netnews.
It is being published now in order to provide the Historical Background out of which those standards have grown. Present-day implementors should be aware that it is NOT NOW APPROPRIATE for use in current implementations.
This document was published as RFC 1849. Also see the original version of this document.
| draft-spencer-usefor-son-of-1036-01.txt | 2009-07-22 | 250KiB |
| draft-spencer-usefor-son-of-1036-00.txt | 2009-05-03 | 250KiB |
This document outlines a method that may be used by authors of successor (or canceling) articles to authenticate their authorship of the original article. As a proto-article article passes through various agents they may include the hash of a secret string in a Cancel-Key header. Later if they wish to use a standard mechanism to remove the original article (eg Cancel or Supersedes) they can include this string in the Cancel-Lock header to verify that they are entitled to perform this operation.
The USEFOR working group ran out of energy for tackling the security issues and never picked up this work to take it to standardization. It was subsequently picked up by Michael Bäuerle, who finished the work. The original cancel lock specification has a few scattered implementations, but was never in widespread use. It's too early to see if this specification will see use.
This document was published as RFC 8315.
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-09.txt | 2017-12-04 | 54KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-08.txt | 2017-11-20 | 53KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-07.txt | 2017-11-19 | 53KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-06.txt | 2017-09-12 | 50KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-05.txt | 2017-05-30 | 48KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-04.txt | 2017-04-08 | 44KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-03.txt | 2017-03-27 | 42KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-02.txt | 2017-03-10 | 34KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-01.txt | 2017-03-08 | 25KiB |
| draft-baeuerle-netnews-cancel-lock-00.txt | 2017-03-06 | 23KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-cancel-lock-01.txt | 1998-11 | 9KiB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-cancel-lock-00.txt | 1998-08 | 8KiB |
| < Netnews Standards | Russ Allbery > Usenet Format and Protocols |