Agent 1.8
Download
- 3.5mg
When I sit down at my computers every morning
the first thing I do is check my mail for new PCBUILD and
PCSOFT postings, and the second thing I do is to scan my
favorite news groups on UseNet. News groups are one of the
most useful features on the internet and just about every ISP
offers some level of news group support. If you are unfamiliar
with UseNet news groups they are similar to email lists but
are presented in a way that allows you to view all the newest
postings at once. The number of postings you can see depends
on how long your news server holds those posts on their
server. There are in excess of thirty thousand news groups on
line covering every subject imaginable and many of them
contain a
lot of postings. Some ISPs hold on to the postings for days
while others delete them within hours.
If you have ever
searched Deja News then
you have accessed UseNet. For an ISP to keep new posts for any
length of time requires a huge amount of server space. There
are third party news servers that will, for a fee, provide you
or your company with a news sever that has huge server
capacity. Both Netscape or Internet Explorer come with free
Email programs that work as basic news readers but there are
also dedicated news readers that offer many more features. One
of the best, and my favorite is Agent 1.7.
Agent by Forte Inc. comes in a variety of flavors both 16 and 32 bit. Free Agent
1.21 is a stripped down version that is freeware and Agent 1.7
is full featured version that is shareware and free to try for
30 days after which it is $29 U.S. to register. There
are big differences between the two. Agent offers extras such
as full email support, news group filtering and full technical
support to name just a few. I have offered as downloads both 32 bit Free
Agent 1.21 with html support, FAQ, and Trial Agent 1.8 with html
support, FAQ, and Adobe Acrobat PDF file user manual.
If you just want to scan news groups and post an occasional
message then Free Agent may be all you need. You can use Free
Agent both off and on line, Free Agent supports full
multitasking so you can be reading in one user group while
downloading messages in another. You can sort and search
messages to find specific articles. Free Agent supports basic
filtering such as Watch and Ignore. You can preview a group by
quick downloading just 50 posts before you bring in 5000 posts
from alt.crazy.folks.nuts. Free Agent allows you to sort
threads by subject or thread so you have an easy to follow
thread from one day to another. Free Agent offers posting to UseNet
or replies by Email as
well as printing, multiple signatures and a wide range of
other configurations. But if Free Agent doesn't meet all your
requirements or if you use Agent as much as I do you can move
up to Agent 1.8
Agent 1.8 offers both a full featured news group reader as
well as a full featured email program.
With the full registered version of Agent 1.8 you have a spell
checker, more filters such as a Kill filter which will stop
those annoying Spam threads from even appearing and an
advanced Watch filter to keep an eye on particular threads.
You can even setup ahead of time to download messages from
particular authors or subjects. Agent has advanced search
capabilities that permit you to search across newsgroups and
within messages. Agent offers better message sorting and MIME
support as well as a customizable toolbar, the ability to
launch URLs from within a message and technical support via
Email.
Here are a few important tips for new users of Free Agent or
Agent.
To use Free Agent or Agent you will need to select
Options….User & System Tab…. and input your ISP news
server information. This will be provided to you by your ISP.
When you first download news groups from your ISP's News
server it may take a while as there will probably something in
the neighborhood of 10,000 to 30,000 groups available. This
may also be true the first time you bring in headers from an
active popular news group. I have brought in as many as 40,000
headers and this takes a while on a dial up connection. Some
groups have file attachments and if you choose to download
them by default Agent will store these attachments in a data
file as well as write them to the location you specify. This
means that if you have downloaded a couple of hundred megs of
say music files, then they will be both in the Agent
directory as well as the download directory. It won't take
long to end up with a three gigabyte Agent directory !
To avoid this after you install Agent I suggest you go to
Group ….Default Properties….then select the ....Receive
Files Tab……put a check in < After saving an attachment,
remove it from the message >
Free Agent 1.21
