| < 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.
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 | 104KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-useage-00.txt | 2004-05 | 94KB |
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 Supersede) 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. Cancel locks have a few scattered implementations, but still aren't in widespread use.
| draft-ietf-usefor-cancel-lock-01.txt | 1998-11 | 9KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-cancel-lock-00.txt | 1998-08 | 8KB |
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 | 8KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-message-id-00.txt | 1998-06 | 6KB |
[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 | 19KB |
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 | 26KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-posted-mailed-00.txt | 1998-06 | 27KB |
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.
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.
| draft-lindsey-hdrreg-netnews-01.txt | 2004-07-05 | 22KB |
| draft-lindsey-hdrreg-netnews-00.txt | 2004-04-19 | 20KB |
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 | 13KB |
| draft-bambenek-posting-guidelines-02.txt | 2002-02 | 13KB |
| draft-bambenek-posting-guidelines-01.txt | 2002-02 | 11KB |
| draft-bambenek-posting-guidelines-00.txt | 2002-02 | 8KB |
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 | 76KB |
| draft-lindsey-usefor-signed-00.txt | 2000-05 | 65KB |
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.
| draft-roessler-usefor-trace-00.txt | 2001-04 | 16KB |
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 | 74KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-11.txt | 2006-10-04 | 74KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-10.txt | 2006-09-17 | 74KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-09.txt | 2006-08-28 | 83KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-08.txt | 2006-05-22 | 79KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-07.txt | 2006-03-05 | 79KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-06.txt | 2005-12-16 | 67KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-05.txt | 2005-07-08 | 61KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-04.txt | 2005-05-24 | 57KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-03.txt | 2005-04-06 | 53KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-02.txt | 2004-11-23 | 51KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-01.txt | 2004-09-14 | 39KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-00.txt | 2004-07-11 | 31KB |
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 | 117KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-13.txt | 2008-12-14 | 118KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-12.txt | 2008-08-27 | 115KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-11.txt | 2008-08-22 | 111KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-10.txt | 2008-08-03 | 107KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-09.txt | 2007-11-10 | 104KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-08.txt | 2007-07-01 | 104KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-07.txt | 2007-01-03 | 103KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-06.txt | 2006-11 | 146KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-05.txt | 2006-01 | 143KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-04.txt | 2005-07 | 148KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-03.txt | 2005-02 | 142KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-02.txt | 2004-12 | 141KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-01.txt | 2004-09 | 135KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-00.txt | 2004-08 | 126KB |
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 | 251KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-12.txt | 2003-11 | 254KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-11.txt | 2003-06 | 256KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-10.txt | 2003-04 | 285KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-09.txt | 2003-02 | 315KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-08.txt | 2002-08 | 306KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-07.txt | 2002-05 | 297KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-06.txt | 2001-11 | 259KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-05.txt | 2001-07 | 278KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-04.txt | 2001-04 | 261KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-03.txt | 2000-02 | 213KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-02.txt | 1999-03 | 175KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-01.txt | 1998-08 | 156KB |
| draft-ietf-usefor-article-00.txt | 1998-05 | 147KB |
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 | 99KB |
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-01.txt | 2003-02-18 | 28KB |
| draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt | 2003-02-01 | 20KB |
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 | 250KB |
| draft-spencer-usefor-son-of-1036-00.txt | 2009-05-03 | 250KB |
| < Netnews Standards | Russ Allbery > Usenet Format and Protocols |