News Infrastructure

RFC850 (June 1983, Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages), superseded by RFC1036 (December 1987, same title) specifies that USENET (news) messages must be formatted as valid Internet mail messages (RFC822) and must also include—in addition to RFC822’s required Date: and From:—the extension fields Newsgroups:, Subject:, Message-ID:, and Path:.

RFC977 (February 1986, Network News Transfer Protocol) spells out the commands sent by NNTP clients to inquire about and fetch articles (news messages), the replication protocol between NNTP servers, and the response codes sent by NNTP servers.

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