I'm trying out Net::NNTP and it's accessing a private method on line 375: @socket = InternetMessageIO.open(@address, @port, @open_timeout, @read_timeout, @debug_output) InternetMessageIO is not defined anywhere in the file, so I assume that it's defined somewhere up from: require 'net/protocol' require 'digest/md5' ...probably from net/protocol. This naturally brings up the question, did this ever work? Was this written for a previous version of Ruby where this method was public? What's going on, here? If someone can explain this situation to me, I'd greatly appreciate! If the only answer you have is to use another library, please mention what that library is! Thank you...