IETF RFC 1849 PDF

Introduction

Network news articles resemble mail messages but are broadcast to potentially large audiences, using a flooding algorithm that propagates one copy to each interested host (or groups thereof), typically stores only one copy per host, and does not require any central administration or systematic registration of interested users. Network news originated as the medium of communication for Usenet, circa 1980. Since then, Usenet has grown explosively, and many Internet sites participate in it. In addition, the news technology is now in widespread use for other purposes, on the Internet and elsewhere.

The earliest news interchange used the so-called "A News" article format. Shortly thereafter, an article format vaguely resembling Internet mail was devised and used briefly. Both of those formats are completely obsolete; they are documented in Appendix A for historical reasons only. With the publication of [RFC850] in 1983, news articles came to closely resemble Internet mail messages, with some restrictions and some additional headers. In 1987, [RFC1036] updated [RFC850] without making major changes.

In the intervening five years, the [RFC1036] article format has proven quite satisfactory, although minor extensions appear desirable to match recent developments in areas such as multi-media mail. [RFC1036] itself has not proven quite so satisfactory. It is often rather vague and does not address some issues at all; this has caused significant interoperability problems at times, and implementations have diverged somewhat. Worse, although it was intended primarily to document existing practice, it did not precisely match existing practice even at the time it was published, and the deviations have grown since.

This Draft attempts to specify the format of articles, and the procedures used to exchange them and process them, in sufficient detail to allow full interoperability. In addition, some tentative suggestions are made about directions for future development, in an attempt to avert unnecessary divergence and consequent loss of interoperability. Major extensions (e.g., cryptographic authentication) that need significant development effort are left to be undertaken as independent efforts.