Chapter 16. Forums
Whereas an email message is delivered to a recipient’s mailbox, a news message is delivered to an NNTP server (news server) into a newsgroup (discussion forum or simply forum). A user must log in to the news server and must subscribe to some concrete newsgroup and work with news messages in the newsgroup.
News messages are in the newsgroups only for limited time. If the user is on holiday for a long duration, he or she might even miss some news contributions. In the case of email, the user would loose messages if the mailbox gets full.
Support from Operating Systems
While NNTP clients are mostly an integral part of mail clients (for example, Outlook Express), NNTP servers are usually not a part of installation sets of common operating systems. This is why the running of an NNTP server is not so easy, and it is usually the business of big ISPs.
Security
Securing news articles is not so common. It is possible to use the NNTP over SSL/TLS communication (in this...
