| Product: |
Forte Agent |
| Date: |
23/07/01 (513 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Very powerful, Highly customizable, Great filters
Disadvantages: Old technology, Needlessly complex at times
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 look how you want it.
But what are these high power news-reading functions that I mentioned earlier? Well, thread watching, which always downloads new messages in particular threads, customisable purging, which allows you to set filters on which messages can automatically be deleted and when, message joining which allows you to join parts of threads together, scheduled downloading, which allows you to set exactly when messages are downloaded and which ones and selective message body downloading, which only downloads message bodies if they meet your (customisable) requirements. Whew, that was a long sentence! And that isn't even a complete list of features!
One feature does deserve special attention, though, and that is the message filtering. You can set up filters that remove messages based on numerous factors including, but not limited to: subject, size, date posted, author, group posted to and whether it was cross-posted. The filters are very powerful, and allow you to look not just for literal strings, but also use various variables. For instance, you could set up a filter that removes messages that contain '$' or 'cash' in the body and are cross-posted to groups 'x', 'y' and 'z'. These filters can be used to give you a customized news fee
d that only contains messages that you are interested in. Clever stuff. The filters are written in a custom scripting language, although it isn't very difficult to learn, and there are plenty of ready-made filters too.
I mentioned earlier that this app looks like a relic from the past, and that is because it is based on a 16-bit app. This means that it is still not perfectly compatible with 32-bit OSs. By this, I mean that it doesn't take advantage of many Win32 features, and it is prone to crashing.
The thing that is going to put most novice users off though is the sheer complexity of it. All the features I have mentioned are not immediately accessible or easy to use, and the whole app does have a certain chunkiness about it. This is not helped by the cryptic options screens, of which there are many. The Agent help newsgroup is often packed with messages asking what option x does.
If you are prepared to put the effort in though, this is far and away the greatest news-reader available. If you are unhappy with the news features of Outlook or Netscape, you should certainly consider this.
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