Forte Agent 1.93 Release. Agent 1.93 is the official release version of Forte's newsreader and email client. For full details on what's contained in this new version, please consult the Release Notes in Agent's online help. (Simply select Menu option Help | Release Notes.) To purchase Agent, visit our web site: http://www.forteinc.com Also visit our web site to keep updated on the latest information about Agent. RUNNING AGENT FOR THE FIRST TIME When you first run Agent, you can choose to use it in one of three ways: - You can purchase a registration key from Forte 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 newsreader-only version with fewer features. After you have selected how you want to run Agent, the program will prompt you for the information it needs to operate. Once you have supplied the necessary setup information and Agent is operational, press F1 to display the online help. You may want to start by reading the Getting Started topic. To view this topic, click on the phrase Getting Started on the Agent Contents page or search help for "Getting Started." UPGRADING If you upgrade from a previous version of Free Agent or Agent, the installation program updates Agent and its components for you. Agent should immediately run for you, with all of your previous settings. IMPORTANT NOTE In order to support larger message line counts, we changed the way line counts and message nesting levels are stored in Agent's database. If you upgrade to version 1.93 and then revert to an older version, you may find that the line counts and message nesting display are incorrect for some messages. WHAT'S NEW IN VERSION 1.93 With version 1.93, we introduce customized versions of Agent for French, German, and Italian. In these versions, the complete Agent user interface is translated. (Sorry! We haven't translated the online help yet. We're working on it...) To learn more about the international versions of Agent, see: http://www.forteinc.com/international This release also includes the following improvements and bugs fixes: - In response to the complaints we received about version 1.92, we changed the way message line counts are stored and displayed: - Agent now stores exact line counts for values of less than 2 million lines. For larger counts, Agent stores an approximate value that is accurate to 4 decimal digits. - You have the option to specify how Agent should display line counts that are too large to fit in the line count column. On the Options | Display Preferences | Messages dialog box, you can choose either to display large counts in an abbreviated format (e.g. "123 M"), or to display "******". You can also increase the width of the column to accommodate larger numbers. - If a line count is approximate (over 2 million), Agent displays the phrase "[Approximately lines]" in the body pane. In the message list pane, Agent rounds all but the most significant digits to zero. - We added an option to change the user interface language, on the Options | Display Preferences | Main Window dialog box. This option allows you to choose which language Agent should use if you have downloaded and installed more than one international language resource DLL from Forte. - We added the name of the user interface language (e.g. "English (American)") to the Agent version number included in the X-Newsreader and X-Mailer header fields for messages that you send. This additional information will make it easier for us to provide support to people using the international versions of Agent. - Agent now allows you to sample up to 1 million messages. Previously, the limit was 32,767 messages. (This change applies to 32-bit Agent only.) - When comparing subjects for threading, Agent now ignores leading and trailing space and tab characters, and treats sequences of more than one space or tab between words as a single space. This should help Agent correctly group messages with subjects that differ only in the formatting of whitespace. - When composing a reply, Agent now uses the actual subject from the original message, not the subject retrieved in the message header. This ensures that the correct subject is used in the reply if there is some discrepancy between the two. - After you print multiple copies of a message, Agent now reverts the count to one copy the next time you print. Agent used to retain the previous count. - If you unsubscribe from a newsgroup and tell Agent to purge all messages and properties, Agent now switches the group's sort back to Thread sort. - Because the UTF-7 MIME encoding is being phased out, we removed it from the choices available for the "Western Allow Unicode" language option. - We added a Getting Started option to the Help menu, to make it easier for new users to get the information they need. - Agent now allows the | vertical bar character to appear in email addresses. - We fixed a bug that could cause a database to become corrupted if it grew larger than 2 gigabytes. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent to crash if you tried to save an attachment with a very long filename extension. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent sometimes to incorrectly format the Subject and other header fields when they were formatted with certain MIME encodings, such as UTF-7 and UTF-8. - We fixed a bug that could cause Agent to crash when encoding header fields with the UTF-7 character set. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent to fail to mark messages read if you tested a new kill filter and selected the option not to have Agent delete the selected messages. - We fixed a bug that allowed a non-trash folder to continue using the Date Deleted sort if you selected a different folder to be the trash folder. - We fixed a bug that made it possible to inadvertently close the browser window after performing a spell check and sending a message from the composition window. - We fixed a bug that caused the status bar not to display descriptions for all top-level menus. WHAT'S NEW IN VERSION 1.92 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 atttachments and non-English character sets. This release also includes the following improvements and bugs fixes: - 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 the new version, 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." - We added a Help | What's New menu option. This command launches your web browser to visit 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. - 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 improved Agent's parsing of subject lines for multipart binary posts, so that Agent is better able to detect and join multipart binaries. - 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. - 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. WHAT'S NEW IN VERSION 1.91 Version 1.91 adds support for the yEnc method for encoding binary attachments. This release also includes the following improvements and bug fixes: - We fixed an incompatibility with newer versions of Windows that sometimes caused Agent to freeze on startup or when launching a URL. - We fixed a bug that could, in rare cases, cause the groups/folders list to become corrupted when you added, deleted, or renamed groups or folders. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent to truncate extremely long URLs when launching a web browser. - We rearranged the Help menu to provide more direct access to the online help Contents, Index, and Find choices. We also added a Post Support Question option, so that it's easier to find. Finally, we added an option to go directly to our web site for support. WHAT'S NEW IN VERSION 1.9 Version 1.9 adds a Trash Folder feature that stores deleted messages for easy recovery. For more information about this feature, see "How to Use the Trash Folder" in the online help. This release also includes a number of improvements and bug fixes. - You can now use the Edit | Undo menu option to undo recent message move, copy, and delete operations. Agent remembers and can undo the ten most recent operations. Also, the Edit | Undo and Redo menu options now display what operation will be performed. - We improved Agent's handling of unknown attachment types, to better protect you against viruses. Now, Agent assumes that most attachment types are potentially dangerous, and prompts for confirmation before launching them. If you wish, you may declare specific types to be safe, if you don't want Agent to warn you before launching files of that type. - Agent now requires that you provide extra confirmation before deleting a group or folder, to better protect you from deleting one by mistake. - We improved the dialog box that pops up if you have messages ready to send when you go offline or close Agent. It now has various options for selecting what to do with the messages. - Agent now automatically disables the Windows Indexing Service for the folder containing Agent's databases. We added this feature because under certain circumstances, the indexing service could corrupt Agent's databases. - In the Address Book and Pick Addresses dialog box, you can now press ESC to terminate the current incremental search, leaving the highlight on the current address book item. This makes it easier to stop one search and begin a new one. - We updated the ISO 8859-7 charset COD file to include three characters recently added to the 8859-7 standard. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent to crash during startup when certain versions of Netscape Navigator were installed on the computer. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent to hang during startup when running under certain versions of Windows, especially Windows ME. - We fixed a bug that could cause Agent to fail to save a message being composed if you had saved the message, but Windows or Agent crashed before you closed Agent. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent to report a "connection closed unexpectedly by server" error when the server reported an error immediately before closing the connection. Now, Agent displays the actual error reported by the server. - We fixed a bug that caused Agent to crash when display messages containing Japanese text with certain invalid escape sequences.