Usenet related terms

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yEnc

yEnc is a new encryption method that has become very popular in the last few years. It is now the default encryption method used for posting into newsgroups.

If you want to post something into a newsgroup, the files have to be encoded into a collection of symbols to put in messages. There are various ways of doing this and yEnc is one of them. Another well-known type is UUencode.

When encoding a message, its size will grow. The encoded form of a message will always be larger than the decoded version of the same message. This is called overhead. When using Uuencode, this overhead will result in approximately a 40% larger message, compared with only 3% when yEnc is used.

Using yEnc therefore saves bandwidth and time when uploading and downloading.