Agent / Free Agent Merge

Version 1.92 introduces a major upgrade of Free Agent. Agent and Free Agent are now available as a single program, and Free Agent has many of the features that were previously available only in Agent, such as support for MIME attachments and non-English character sets.

When you first run Agent, you can choose to use it in one of three ways:

• You can purchase a registration key from Forté to fully enable all of Agent's features.
• You can try out all of Agent's features for 30 days free. At the end of the trial, you can either purchase a registration key, or you can revert to running the program as Free Agent.
• You can run the program as Free Agent, a news reader-only version with fewer features.

What's New

We added a Help | What's New menu option. This command launches your web browser to the What's New Page on Forté's web site to find out what's new with Agent. Each time you visit the site, it automatically shows you what's happened since the last time you visited.

Agent also periodically displays a What's New Reminder dialog box, to remind you to visit our web site. On the dialog box, you can change how often you want to be reminded, or disable the reminders altogether.

Language Translations

Agent can now load its UI resources (menus, dialog boxes, accelerators, and strings) from a separate resource-only DLL. This will make it easier for us to release non-English versions of Agent and Free Agent. Follow our progress on the Agent Translation page.

Other Enhancements

• We improved Agent's parsing of subject lines for multipart binary posts, so that Agent is better able to detect and join multipart binaries.
• We increased the maximum size of the database file for each newsgroup and folder from 2 gigabytes to 4 gigabytes.
• We increased the maximum thread nesting level that Agent can display from 15 to 127. In previous versions, the maximum level that Agent would display by default was 6, although users could increase the level to 15. So, if you are an existing user who is upgrading to version 1.92, you may want to increase the maximum level. You can do that on the General Preferences dialog box, Message List tab. On the same dialog box, you may want to decrease the Follow-Up Indentation value, so that more follow-ups fit on the screen. If you are a new user, the default maximum nesting level is 30, and the default follow-up indentation is 3. Of course, you can change these values if you wish.
• Agent can now display message line counts of up to 4 billion lines. In previous versions, the maximum count Agent could display was 500,000 lines. Agent would display "****" for larger counts. In 1.92, for counts larger than 9999, the displayed value is only approximate. And, so that large counts will fit in the "Lines" column, Agent uses the suffixes K for 1000 lines, M for 1 million lines, and G for 1 billion lines. NOTE: The K, M, and G suffixes indicate line counts, not message sizes in bytes. To make this fact more obvious, we changed the name of the message list column header from "Size" to "Lines."
• On the launch attachment confirmation dialog box, we made the default pushbutton No instead of Yes, to make it harder for users to accidentally launch an attachment that may contain a virus.
• When MIME-encoding a message subject, Agent no longer encodes the initial "Re:" for replies. We made this change because certain other programs fail to detect a reply when the "Re:" is encoded.
• We added the option to disable automatic detection of yEnc-encoded attachments, either globally or for selected newsgroups. This option is on the Receive Files tab of the Group Properties dialog box.
• We added an Update Registration Key option to the Help menu. If you request a new registration key from Forté, you can use this option to update Agent with the new key.