What is a USENET Newsreader?

The network news transmission protocol is an Internet application protocol that is mainly used to read and post news articles (commonly known as "posts", more formally "newsgroup mail") to Usenet, and is also responsible for the transmission of news between servers.

The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is the dominant protocol used by computer clients and servers to manage nodes on Usenet newsgroups. The Network News Transfer Protocol replaced the original Usenet protocol, the UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Protocol (UUCP), some time ago. The Network News Transfer Protocol server manages a global network of collected Usenet newsgroups and includes your Internet access provider's server. A network news transfer protocol client program is included as part of Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, or other web browsers, or you may use a separate client program called a newscaster. ^[1]

The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is a protocol that implements the process of publishing, querying, repairing, and recording news articles by using a reliable server-client streaming mode (such as TCP / IP port 119). With NNTP, news articles only need to be stored on one server host, and subscribers located on other network hosts can read news articles by establishing a streaming connection to the news host. NNTP establishes the technical foundation for the widespread use of newsgroups.

The NNTP model was built after the newsgroup network system (USENET News System), but NNTP makes few requirements for the structure, content, and storage of news articles, so it can be easily adopted by other non-USENET systems. With NNTP, there is an interactive mechanism for hosts that exchange news articles to decide which articles need to be delivered.

The host wants to get new news messages, or want to know which machine has new news, need to contact one or more network neighbors through NNTP. The host client will then query which new articles have reached the entire newsgroup or several newsgroups, and this process is done with the help of the NEWNEWS instruction. The client will receive a list of new articles from the server and request delivery of articles that he does not have and wants. Finally, the client tells the server which articles they have received. The server will add those that have been copied and what needs to be sent to its favorites, so only those articles that are not duplicated and the client wants can be transmitted.

NNTP uses commands and responses for communication. The command consists of a command word, with parameters in some cases. NNTP has many commands. The main commands are:

News (message ID): display letterhead, blank lines and specific article body (text).

Message ID: optional field; is the article message ID, located at the article header. If empty, the current article is hypothetical.

Letterhead: Equivalent to the ARTICLE command, but it returns only the article letterhead.

Status: Similar to the ARTICLE command, but it does not return text information.

Group (ggg): The required parameter ggg is the name of the selected newsgroup. The LIST command contains a valid set of newsgroups. A successful selection response returns the news numbers of the first and last news in the group and estimates of archived news numbers.

News body: Equivalent to the ARTICLE command, but it only returns the news body.

Directory: Returns a list of valid newsgroups and related information.

Newsgroups: A list of newsgroups consisting of date and time is listed in the same format as the LIST command.

NewNews: Because "dates" are listed, a specific newsgroup can send or receive a set of news information IDS.

Next: The "current news indicator" maintained internally is advanced over the next news in the current newsgroup.

Mail: If the mail allows it, a response code of 340 is returned, indicating that the delivered news should be sent.

Stop: The server program responds to the QUIT command and then closes the connection to the client.