NNTP Commands and Command Extensions

One of the great strengths of the open, cooperative process used to develop Internet standards is that new protocols are usually designed by building on older ones. This saves development time and effort, and promotes compatibility between technologies. As I explained earlier in the chapter, NNTP was based in many ways on principles from SMTP; SMTP, in turn, borrowed ideas from earlier protocols: Telnet and FTP. This legacy can be seen in the similarities between NNTP commands and those of these earlier protocols.

Command Syntax

As in SMTP, all NNTP commands are ASCII text that are sent over the NNTP TCP connection to an NNTP server, from the device acting as the client (which may be a newsreader client or an ...

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