1. Introduction

This document defines the standard format for the interchange of network News messages among USENET hosts. It describes the format for messages themselves and gives partial standards for transmission of news. The news transmission is not entirely in order to give a good deal of flexibility to the hosts to choose transmission hardware and software, to batch news, and so on.

There are five sections to this document. Section two defines the format. Section three defines the valid control messages. Section four specifies some valid transmission methods. Section five describes the overall news propagation algorithm.