Quite a number of people use NNTP on a regular basis and it is safe to say that some need it on a daily basis. NNTP is an application protocol used on the internet and it has two main functions. Primarily, NNTP is used for reading as well as posting articles belonging on Usenet, which other people recognize as Netnews and for transferring news between news servers. NNTP exists on Application Layer, which belongs to OSI Model. There are some ports, which NNTP is known to use. One of the ports is TCP port 119 and the other one is TCP port 563. The second port is used by NNTP, which has SSL. Usenet can be loosely defined as a huge internet system for shared messages.
The specification for NNTP, RFC 977 was completed in March of the year 1986. Originally, the design of Usenet was around UUCP network. Many article transfers took place over telephone links of computers directly. Therefore, posters and users logged in the very computers that were used to host the servers and read articles on the local disk directly. NNTP changed all this and now users can read news articles from Usenet more comfortably. NNTP came in place of the original protocol used by Usenet; UNIX to UNIX. Servers belonging to NNTP manage the worldwide network which consists of Usenet groups which are collected together and also includes the server a user’s provider of Internet access is using. A client which belongs to NNTP is a part of Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape as well as other Web browsers. Users can also use news reader.
With NNTP hosts which exchange news articles use an interactive mechanism to decide the articles to be transmitted. This helps in the transfer of only unduplicated articles. Moreover, only desired articles are let through. It is not difficult for a user to subscribe to a distant group using a server belonging to NNTP. All one needs to do is to specify nntp as the desired method then put the address of the server belonging to NNTP as the address of uhm. If a user’s server is on a port which is non-standard, they should set the select method’s third element to the number of the port and they will be able to connect to the right port although they will need to edit the info of the group. The foreign group’s name can be similar to that of the native group.