Forté Free Agent is a powerful and easy-to-use Usenet newsgroup reader. It allows you to browse newsgroups both online and offline.
Free Agent Features
These features are available in both Free Agent and Agent newsreaders:
ONLINE/OFFLINE OPERATION
You can configure Free Agent for online or offline operation, to set your own balance between convenience and economy. In offline mode, it briefly connects to the server to retrieve article headers, lets you browse them offline and mark the interesting ones, and then goes online for another quick session to retrieve the marked articles.
In online mode, you can browse newsgroups at will, dipping into threads as they interest you. You can still mark long articles to be downloaded later, or you can download one article while browsing others. Which leads us to...
MULTITASKING
Free Agent does internal multitasking, allowing you to do many online tasks at once. For example, you can browse articles in one newsgroup while retrieving headers for another, or download long articles while continuing to browse.
CONFIGURABLE MULTI-PANE WINDOWS
The user interface is so flexible and easy to use that it deserves a page of its own!
IMAGES and BINARY ATTACHMENTS
You can post and receive articles with binary attachments, with automatic splitting and combining to span multiple messages. If the attachment is viewable (like an image or a sound) you can view it from within the newsreader. The world of alt.binaries.pictures is yours to command!
ARTICLE DATABASE
It maintains an intelligent database of headers and articles, and allows you to control its pruning strategy. You can have it keep only the new headers, keep headers for as long as they remain valid on your news server, or several other options. This is especially powerful in combination with the next feature...
THREADING AND NAVIGATION
Free Agent does multi-level article threading, using both the subject and the article ID, so you always know exactly what an article is a response to. It also offers watch and ignore commands for threads, and rapid navigation within and among threads.
When combined with the intelligent pruning described above, this gives you a coherent view of threads unmatched by any other newsreader. Because articles often show up at a news server out of order, newsreaders that simply show you each day's batch of new articles make it very difficult to follow the logic of a thread. Free Agent, on the other hand, is able to thread new articles in with old, recreating all the relationships between the articles. This means that if somebody posts a response that just says "Don't try that -- it wipes out your hard disk!" you'll know what article they're responding to and what they're talking about.
EASY BROWSING
Free Agent makes it easy for you to quickly sample threads and newsgroups. You don't have to subscribe to a newsgroup to see what's happening -- if you're wondering what alt.usenet.kooks is all about, you can dip into it and get only the most recent articles. You can then subscribe to it, get more articles, or just decide they're a bunch of kooks and move on.
PAINLESS INSTALLATION and SETUP
If you're currently using another popular stand alone newsreader such as WinVN or NewsXpress, switching to Free Agent is a breeze. The first time you run it, it extracts all the setup information it needs from your existing program's configuration files. You can also have it import the newsgroup list from your old program, and it will even remember which groups you're subscribed to and which messages you've seen!
ONLINE TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND INFORMATION
We provide online technical support through our Technical Support Pages, including up-to-date Frequently-Asked Question (FAQ) pages, known-bug lists, etc. We also monitor a number of Usenet groups and CompuServe forums.
Check the Unofficial Forte Agent Newsreader Mirror Site for a list of useful utilities.
OTHER COOL FEATURES
All of the usual suspects: printing, posting replies via follow-up articles and/or email, signatures (one for each newsgroup, if you want), configurable options for almost everything in the program, and many other useful features.
