OT: Forte Agent 6.0

I don't know thaat program, stopped using MSFT mailer back last century when I tripped over Forte Agent. Only shareware I've paid for an kept up-to-date. Not perfect, but very good.

And I only do text groups as a rule, my ISP provider's news bogs down in peak hours due to the binaries downloaders, eternal-september is good, free.

It's what I'm using here on a Win7 x64 laptop for last few months, I had to email them for my password, since usual machine in storage for months.

Worth it? I don't remember 5.0, so cannot say, apart from the notion Forte probably need the sales for this boutique item. My Agent 6.00/32.1186 says 2009, so there's not much happening last couple years, but then, is much missing now?

Stable software.

You too :o) Grant.

I didn't see anything that warranted the money.

In truth I hate Forte's interface compared to even a text based NNTP reader or NewWatcher back on the 90's on Macintosh. But the upgrade did improve in binary downloading if that is one of your requirements. Otherwise there are still a ton of bugs present and the menus still drive me crazy. Of course I haven't found another current graphical reader which drives me less nuts.

Happy New Year, Mark DeArman

That's my problem too, not much to choose from, though I'll have Linux running full time again soon, I mostly do text, so terminal based reader should work.

Agent used to be very good for email lists, like lkml, treats several hundred emails/day like usenet.

Grant.

Get ye to

and check out the release notes; only you can decide if the changes are worth it.

Bugs? I'm sure there are some, and maybe I've been trained to automatically work around them, but I have it running most of the day, every day, and haven't run across any. Disclaimer: the only binary group I check is alt.binaries.schematics.electronic, so I can't comment on its performance with gazillion-part binaries spread over multiple servers or similar pathologies.

Whether it's worth the upgrade cost or not is up to you but I do love the "hide quoted text" feature. Makes following threads where the participants haven't been snipping the text much nicer.

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

I use Thunderbird 8.0 when groups.google.com isn't working properly. It was free and seems to work fine.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I like it because it offers more filtering capabilities. Other than that, v6 is no different than v5. (The release notes claim lots of new features for Agent E-mail, which I don't use and can't comment on... I use Eudora Pro v7.) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Bugs? It's been many versions back before I can remember a bug. As for menu problems... there are indeed an excess of features... but the tool bars _are_ customizable.

I started out using TIN... I'd never go back. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I prefer Gravity for its UI and graphics but it's long past life support so I ditched it for Agent.

I purchased Agent back when the ISP's were dumping their newsgroup servers. I had a hard time adjusting from OE, the fonts made things difficult to see and follow. Since then I was using WLM on XP, no problems except for the pastel colors.

Now going back to Agent, it's not so bad. The menus are a mess, took me some time to find the Reply to button, it's not in the dropdown for the message!. I havent used OE in a while, so the fonts/format don't bother me anymore.. Just wish MS didn't change/break functionality, WLM worked fine for me before they dropped support for XP.

As for 6.0, I'll stay with 5.0 for now.

Cheers