A Description of NNTP Introduction Due to the different network transport used, NNTP provides for a vastly different approach to news exchange from C-news. The stream connection allows the client and server to interactively negotiate article transfer with nearly no turnaround delay, thus keeping the number of duplicate articles low. Together with the Internet's high transfer rates, this adds up to a news transport that surpasses the original UUCP networks by far.
Various commands allow clients to retrieve, send and post articles.
The difference between sending and posting is that the latter may involve articles with incomplete header information. Article retrieval may be used by news transfer clients as well as newsreaders. If so, the client sends the article, terminated by a single dot on a separate line. Pushing news has the single disadvantage that it places a heavy load on the server system, since it has to search its history database for every single article. The problem with pulling news is that it needs tight control by the server over which groups and distributions it allows a client to request.