Forte Agent

When I first started writing this op, I got terribly bogged down with describing what newsgroups are and how you use them. I’ve trashed that bit now, and have decided instead to concentrate on these programs and how they work, and only briefly touch on what newsgroups are. ***** Warning: this is going to be a fairly long op, and I apologize for that in advance. I probably should have asked DooYoo to open a separate category for the free version of this program, but I didn’t. Mea Culpa and please forgive me! Now, on to the op. ***** The two programs that Forté, Inc. (http://www.forteinc.com/main/homepage.php) brings us are Agent and Free ...

Although Agent does have e-mail facilities, they are fairly basic. No, the real reason to use this app is for the news reading capabilities. It is truly the most powerful news client available. When you first load it up, you would be forgiven if you thought that you had just stepped into Windows 3.1. The interface does look rather ancient. Don't let that fool you, though, because it is highly customisable. You can do the usual things such as select which columns to view in the various windows, but you can also change the arrangement of windows, which ones are visible, screen fonts and colours and customize the toolbar and menus. You are sure to get it to ...

After struggling with Outlook Express for too long, Forte Agent came as a blissful relief. It has sensible filtering, easy keyboard-driven use, and basically fulfills all my expectations of a newsreader. It's difficult to wax lyrical about something as mundane as a newsreader, but I must stress that I use this product at least an hour each day, and I've no cause for complaint whatsoever. It's very easy to set it up to (for example), automatically retrieve message bodies for your own posts and any others in threads that you reply to, or filter out spam on the flimsiest of criteria. You can set it up to work with multiple news servers, get ...