Network News Transfer Protocol - Definition and Overview

The Network News Transport Protocol or NNTP is an Internet application protocol used primarily for reading and posting Usenet articles, as well as transferring news among servers. It was originally developed by Brian Kantor at the University of California, San Diego with Phil Lapsley from the University of California, Berkeley. Other contributors included Stan Barber from the Baylor College of Medicine and Erik Fair of Apple Computer.

Usenet was originally designed around the UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct computer-to-computer telephone links. Readers and posters would log into the same computers that hosted the servers, reading the articles directly from the local disk.

As local area networks and the Internet became more commonly used, it became desirable to allow newsreaders to be run on personal computers, and a means of employing the Internet to handle article transfers was desired. Because networked Internet-compatible filesystems were not yet widely available, it was decided to develop a new protocol that resembled SMTP, but was tailored for reading newsgroups.

The protocol remains in widespread use, and at present efforts are underway to produce an updated standard. The IMAP protocol can also be used for reading newsgroups.

External Links

• Brian Kantor and Phil Lapsley (1986). RFC 977, Network News Transfer Protocol.
• Mark Horton (1987). RFC 1036, Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages.
• Stan Barber et al (2000), RFC 2980, Common NNTP Extensions.
• IETF NNTP Working Group (http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/nntp/ietf.html)