This page contains the top 10 questions regarding Free Agent. Click on the question below to be taken to the appropriate answer.
1) How do I configure Agent for offline operation?
A) Agent is designed to make offline newsreading as convenient as possible. When used with an appropriate Winsock driver, it will automatically connect to your service provider when it needs to go online and disconnect as soon as it is through. This can save you both effort and money, but you may need to do some careful configuring to make it work properly.
The first step is to configure Agent to go online only when it needs to, and to immediately go offline when it is through. To do this, select the Options | General Preferences menu item and click on the Online tab on the resulting dialog box. This dialog box contains several options that let you control the details of Agent's online and offline modes. Although you may eventually want to customize these to suit your own preferences, you can quickly set them for offline operation by clicking the Use Offline Defaults button.
2) I don't understand the settings in AGENT.INI. Where can I find an explanation of the settings?
A) A complete breakdown of the AGENT.INI file is available in the help file by selecting Help | Search for help, typing in AGENT.INI, and then double clicking on it when it appears in the help list.
3) Why do I get "This message is no longer available" errors?
A) This means that your news server no longer has the message that you just tried to download. This can easily happen if you have your purging settings defined to keep message headers for a fixed number of days or to never purge them at all (see the Purging tab on the Group | Properties dialog box). Because news servers keep messages for an unpredictable amount of time, the only safe settings are Purge All and Purge messages no longer available on server.
4) How do I mark and retrieve all messages in certain groups?
A) There are two ways to do this:
If you want to do this on an ad-hoc basis after you've retrieved the headers, press Ctrl+A to select all of the headers, select Message | Mark for Retrieval and then select Online | Get Marked Message Bodies.
If you always want to get the bodies automatically for a particular group, select the group and use the Group | Properties option to open the Group Properties dialog. On the Retrieving page, check "Override default settings" and then check "Retrieve bodies for all new messages."
5) If I retrieve new headers, but I don't read any messages, how do I prevent the headers from being marked as read?
A) By selecting Group | Default Properties (or Properties if behavior is desired only in current group) and selecting "Do not mark any existing messages read" in the "When retrieving new message headers" section.
6) How do I suppress the header details when I'm reading a message?
A) Remove the checkmark from the Message | Show All Header Fields menu item (or use the right mouse button to bring up the speed menu and remove the checkmark from the Show All Header Fields item). This will start the message just after the header.
Note that this won't eliminate a header that somebody else quoted and included in the message. That makes it into part of the message body, where it is always displayed.
7) How do I have my signature added to the end of my post?
A) The default signature is designated in the Group | Default Properties for All Groups Dialog. Select the "Posting" tab on this dialog, and then select the signature you want as your default signature. The signature is automatically attached to all documents that you post or mail using Agent.
If you would like to set up different signatures for each group, you may override the default by first selecting the group whose properties you are overriding, and then select Group | Properties for Selected Groups. Go to the "Posting" tab, select "Override Default Settings", and then choose the signature to use when posting from that group.
You can also override the default signature on an individual message by pressing the "All Fields" button and changing the signature field.
8) Why doesn't my signature appear in the edit window?
A) Once you've set up your signature as described in the topic above, you may be surprised when it still doesn't appear in the edit window or in the messages in the Outbox. Don't worry - Agent appends the signature at the time that it sends the message, although it never appends it to the part that you see. If you want to verify that Agent is going to append the correct signature to your post, press the All Fields button. The name of the signature that Agent is going to use will appear in the Signature field. If you want to use something other than the default signature, you can change it here.
9) When do articles get purged?
A) Like most things in Agent, this is configurable. By default, Agent purges outdated articles from a group each time you tell it to download new headers for the group, which you do with the various Get ... Headers commands in the Online menu.
You can also choose to have articles purged whenever you close Agent, so that old articles will be gone the next time you start up.
This means that when you're through browsing a group, your articles aren't purged when you leave the group as they are with most other newsreaders. Instead they persist at least until you close Agent, and perhaps until the next time you go online to get new headers, which might be several days later.
10) How do I control which articles are purged?
A) Whenever Agent is purging articles for a group, it examines each article to see if it should be deleted. It makes this decision based on the settings in the What to Purge page of the Properties... and Default Properties... dialog boxes (reached through the Group menu).
These dialog boxes allow you to set different criteria for deleting articles depending on whether you've previously downloaded the article body and whether you've read the article. For example, most people set these options so that articles with their full text are kept longer than mere headers, since these are the articles that interested them enough to read in the first place.
There are two main sections on this dialog box - one for articles that you've already read, and one for articles that are still marked unread. Within each section, there are separate options for articles without bodies (i.e. headers only) and articles that do have bodies (i.e. whose text you've previously downloaded).
You can choose to have articles with no bodies deleted:
- When they're no longer available on the server
- This option automatically deletes all headers that the news server has already deleted from its own list of articles. Selecting this option makes the list of articles displayed by Agent a mirror image of the articles that are available from the server. This is probably the best option for most groups.
- When they're older than a specified threshold
- This option deletes headers based on their age.
- On every purge
- This option deletes the headers on every purge. Selecting this will make Agent work like most other newsreaders, although we think that negates one of our big advantages.
For articles that do have bodies, you have the following options:
- On every purge
- This option deletes the articles before downloading any new headers. As with headers, selecting this will make Agent work like most other newsreaders.
- On every purge, delete bodies only
- This is like the previous option, but leaves the header in the database so that you can download the article again if you choose.
- When they're older than a specified threshold
- This option deletes articles based on their age. You might specify that you want articles with bodies kept for 30 days, and manually set the "Keep" flag for any that you don't want automatically purged.
- Never
- If you select this option, Agent will never automatically delete articles. They'll accumulate until you delete them manually, or until something causes their purging status to change. (For example, you might set unread articles to never be deleted, but read articles to be deleted after 30 days. This means that an unread article would never be purged, but when you read it it will then be purged after 30 days.)
Regardless of how you set the above options, you can always override them for an individual article. If you want to delete an article before its time, simply delete it manually. If you want to keep an article longer, set its "Keep" flag and Agent will never automatically delete it.