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4.5 news, nntp and snews

The news, nntp, and snews schemes, defined in RFC 1738, are used for reading Usenet newsgroups. For compatibility with non-standard-compliant news clients, the url library allows host and port fields to be included in news URLs, even though they are properly only allowed for nntp and snews.

news and nntp URLs have the following form:

‘news:newsgroup’
Retrieves a list of messages in newsgroup;
‘news:message-id’
Retrieves the message with the given message-id;
‘news:*’
Retrieves a list of all available newsgroups;
‘nntp://host:port/newsgroup’
‘nntp://host:port/message-id’
‘nntp://host:port/*’
Similar to the ‘news’ versions.

The default port for nntp (and news) is 119. The difference between an nntp URL and a news URL is that an nttp URL may specify an article by its number. The ‘snews’ scheme is the same as ‘nntp’, except that it is tunneled through SSL and has default port 563.

These URLs are retrieved via the Gnus package.

— User Option: url-news-server

This variable specifies the default news server from which to fetch news, if no server was specified in the URL. The default value, nil, means to use the server specified by the standard environment variable ‘NNTPSERVER’, or ‘news’ if that environment variable is unset.