A post consist of a body part (the part with the text that you are reading)
and a header, that contains information about this post (where your news
client will show some parts of it, but usually not all parts of it). Every
header line is a single line, containing of a keyword, followed by a colon
and a space before the actually data is written there. A line break indicates
that one header line ends here and a new ones begins. After there is one
blank line, the body of the post starts.
| Header-Line |
Meaning |
| Content-Transfer-Encoding |
Tells your news client what MIME-coding this posts
uses. For text this might be 7bit, 8bit or quoted-printable, for binary
data it's base64 (only exists if it is a MIME post). |
| Content-Type |
Tells your news client what MIME-content type this
post has (only exists if it is a MIME post). |
| Date |
Contains the date when the post was sent to a server
for the first time. |
| Expires |
This line tells a NNTP server after what time it
may remove the message from the NG. It may remove it earlier for space
reasons, but it won't keep it longer than this date. If this line
is not present, the message will stay as long as possible. |
| Followup-To |
Contains a list of NGs (separate by comma, without
spaces after the comma) to that replies shall be sent. If this line
doesn't exist, the NGs in the Newsgroups-line will be used. If this
line contains the word "poster" replies are sent via e-mail
to the poster. |
| From |
The line with name/e-mail of the poster who wrote
the message. May not be the one who also sent it to Usenet (see Sender
line). |
| Lines |
Contains the number of text lines in the body |
| Message-ID |
Contains a worldwide unique ID to identify the post.
Server use it when exchanging messages and news client use them to
identify a copy of a message on several different NGs. It usually
has a format similar to:
<unique-string-or-number@service.com> |
| MIME-Version |
This means the post is a MIME post and the line tells
you the version, so a MIME compatible client will handle it correctly. |
| Newsgroups |
Contains the list of NGs to that this messages was
posted to, the single groups are separated by a comma (without a space
after each comma). |
| NNTP-Posting-Client |
The IP address of the user that was used for posting
this messages, used rarely as the official line for that is NNTP-Posting-Host,
however, many server use NNTP-Posting-Host incorrectly (see below). |
| NNTP-Posting-Date |
A Date sometimes added by the NNTP server in case
the current server date is different to the date provided by the news
client. |
| NNTP-Posting-Host |
The IP address of the user who posted the message
or the IP address of the server that was used for posting this message
(actually it should be the first one, but often it's the last one). |
| Organization |
Either the organization of the sender of the organization
that runs the Usenet server being used for posting. |
| Path |
The path lines shows what way the message took to
reach your news server. All server that had been passed on its way
are mentioned in that line, the less, the better. |
| Reply-To |
This line contains name/e-mail address that should
be used for replying to the post by mail. If no such line exists,
the data of the From-line is used. |
| Sender |
Contains name/e-mail of the person who sent this
post to the Usenet. That needn't be the author of the message (you
may post a message for another person). In case poster and sender
is the same person, there is only a From-line. |
| Subject |
Contains the subject of the post |
| X- |
X-lines are nonstandard lines that had been added
by many clients and servers, but are actually not part of any official
standard. They are never mandatory and you can put your own X-lines
there, like "X-MyStupid-Line:". |
| X-Accept-Language |
Contains the language code of the language of the
language that the poster prefers to see in replies (e.g. "en"
means English), can also contain more than one language code. |
| X-Admin |
E-mail address of the administrator of the Usenet
server that was used for posting. |
| X-Comments |
Containing additional comments usually added by the
Usenet server. |
| X-Complaints-To |
Contains an URL or e-mail address for people that
want to complain about this post or customer who made that post, in
case of netabuse or ToS violations. |
| X-Mailer |
Same as X-Newsreader, containing the client that was
used for creating the post. |
| X-Newsreader |
Sometimes placed their by news clients, so people
can see with what software this post was created. |
| X-Originating-Host |
In case it was "resent" from the original
host to another one, this line may have been added by the second host. |
| X-Priority |
A number that represents the priority of the post
(it was adopted from X-Priority within e-mail headers, this line has
no purpose in practice). |
| Xref |
A line that tells you the article number that this
article has on your server or a list of article numbers if it is a
xpost to more than one NG (as messages have different numbers in each
NG, only the Message-ID always stays the same). This line is not really
part of the header, you server adds it the moment you download the
article, because it's different from server to server. |
| X-Trace |
Additional information about the post, once again
containing the date of posting, the server it was originally posted
to and other additional information, being mainly useful for the admins
of a server to trace back abuse. |
![[The Usenet Newbie Project]](zzzpics/newbie-project.png)
