The NNTP provider allows for both reading and posting of news articles on a
news server.

Reading news

Nothing special should be required for the configuration of a connection to
a news server using the provider. The protocol to use is nntp.

  URLName url = new URLName("nntp://user:pass@host:port");
  Store store = session.getStore(url);
  Folder root = store.getDefaultFolder();
  Folder altTest = root.getFolder("alt.test");

If a username and password are not supplied, no authentication will be
attempted to the server (it assumes that the server is public). The port can
be omitted, it defaults to 119.

The NNTP store attempts to use NNTP extensions such as XOVER, but will fall
back to standard NNTP as per RFC 977 if such commands are not understood.

Posting articles

Because JavaMail (or rather, the implementation of it provided by Sun) does
not allow you to have both a Store and a Transport using the same protocol
name, you must use the nntp-post protocol to locate a suitable Transport
object for posting your articles. Otherwise, the URL format is identical.

  URLName url = new URLName("nntp-post://user:pass@host:port");
  Transport transport = session.getTransport(url);
  transport.sendMessage(message, message.getAllRecipients());

The message should be an ordinary JavaMail MimeMessage, with the Newsgroups
header set, as follows:

  Address[] addresses = { new NewsAddress("alt.test") };
  message.addRecipients(MimeMessage.RecipientType.NEWSGROUPS, addresses);

The NNTP Transport ignores any recipient types other than newsgroups, does
not honour the host specified in the NewsAddress (it posts to the transport
specified), and ignores address types other than NewsAddress. If you wish to
simultaneously post and mail a message, you must also send the message by
the other required Transport(s).

Newsrc

The NNTP provider provides a mechanism for marking articles as read. This
corresponds to the .newsrc mechanism often used by UNIX newsreaders. You can
write your own object implementing the Newsrc interface and use that to
manage the read-states of articles any way you like, if for instance you do
not have access to a local filesystem.

By default a filesystem-based newsrc provider is supplied (FileNewsrc). This
is currently under development and is not completely stable, please feel
free to improve it. It uses the UNIX newsrc standard format, saved in a file
called .newsrc-<host> in the user's home directory (much like netscape
messanger), if the user has the appropriate access privileges.

Filtering

No filtering mechanism is currently supplied. It was originally hoped that
JavaMail would provide a standard architecture for this, but this
possibility now seems remote. Suggestions are welcome.


Chris Burdess, September 2003