About the FAQ

• This page provides answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Agent.
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• Go here for the Agent Premium Newsgroups (APN) FAQ.
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Agent 3

Agent 4

Agent 5

Agent 6

Binary Attachments

Browsing and Navigating

Configuration and Setup

Editing and Posting

Email and Folders

Error Messages

Errors reported by the server

Errors reported by Winsock

Filtering Messages

General Questions

MIME issues

Miscellaneous

Reading Messages

Retrieving Messages

Alt-T doesn't open the Tools menu in the Composition window

<ALT T> is for both the Tools menu and for the To: field in the composition window. Pressing the two keys at the same time will bring you to the To field. To open the Tools menu via the keyboard, press and release the <ALT> key and then press the <T> key.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I cancel the retrieval of a single message within a larger download task?

Yes, you can stop the download of a single message body from a multiple-body retrieval task without stopping the entire task.

From Agent’s main browser window (not the Task Manager window) select the folder which contains the message you want to remove from the list. In the Message List pane, select the message or messages you want to remove from the task. You can then use either Action menu | Cancel Retrieval of Selected Bodies or Right-click context menu | Cancel Body Retrieval to stop download of this message body.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I change the priorities of my news servers? How do I configure multiple servers 'the right way'?

When configuring the news servers in Agent, they will be listed in alphabetical order, according to the name you entered in step two of the Create News Server Wizard. The only way you can change the listed order in the Servers And Accounts listing is by changing the name of the server. Fortunately, that is not how you change the priority of the servers. For that, go to Folder | Default Properties | News Access Plan and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to change the server priorities. To disable a server without deleting it, uncheck it.

Like most settings in the Default Properties panels, this can be overridden on a per-folder basis via Folder | Properties.

For more details about the News Access Plan, please consult the Help file via the button on the panel, or see this FAQ entry

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I display a folder in more than one Desk?

Yes, you can display a message folder in more than one Desk.

The only Desk in Agent 3 that actually contains folders is the special All Folders Desk. All other Desks merely hold shortcuts to the folders. As such, you can copy your message folders to any number of Desks as you want.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I post to a different server than I download from?

Yes, you can. You can set Agent to post via a different server than you retrieve from. This is done via Options | Default Properties | News Access Plan | Posting Messages. Select the option to Override the Retrieving Headers servers list and then enable/disable the servers as you wish for posting. Agent will use the first enabled server for posting.

This option is overridable on a per-folder basis.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I rename a newsgroup folder?

Yes, you can rename any message folder, be it used for email or a newsgroup. To rename a folder, select it in the Folder pane and right-click and select Rename Folder..., or the menuitem Folder | Rename Folder..., or merely hit the F2 key.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I still use multiple instances?

Yes, if you want to continue using multiple instances of Agent for any reason, you still can.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.19.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I view the descriptions of the newsgroups before I download headers?

Yes, you can. One of the options available in the Update Directory dialog (accessable through the Newsgroup Directory) is the option to download the newsgroup descriptions. If you select this, the newsgroup description, if present, will be displayed next to the newsgroup name in the Newsgroup Directory.

Not all newsgroups have descriptions, so many of the groups will have no such information present.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Changing the Group Directory search history

This can be changed by editing the agent.ini file. Look for the key "MaxHistory" in the GroupDir section and change the number. Agent needs to be opened and a new search expression used and then closed before the old searches will be removed.

Naturally, Agent must be closed when editing the ini file, and do not let it word wrap or you will destroy several settings.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.27.05, please give us your feedback.

Ctrl-d gone?

<Ctrl D> has not been a documented command in Agent for several versions. To save an attachment to your default location, use the Save All To Default Folder command, located in File | Attachments. The keyboard shortcut is listed next to the command.

The documented command to save attachments from Agent has been Save All Attachments since sometime in the version 1.x development cycle through 2.0, and now that's been renamed with the 3.0 re-write. We just never bothered to remove the old command until now.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.12.05, please give us your feedback.

How can I manually set the number of connections Agent 3 uses per news server?

To manually set how many connections to the news server Agent will use, go to the server's settings in Tools \ Servers And Accounts. From there, you can adjust the number of maximum allowed connections, how many are reserved for priority tasks and if Agent will automatically adjust.

The default is 10, 1 and enabled, respectively. However, some news services use a non-standard error message that Agent does not recognize for a "too many connections" condition. In this case, or if you want to throttle the bandwidth Agent will use, you can reduce the number of maximum connections. The auto adjust setting will in no case cause Agent to exceed the set maximum, so it is recommended that you always leave that enabled.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.12.05, please give us your feedback.

How can I rearrange my folders list?

Agent's list of folders now supports Drag&Drop, so you can drag and drop your folders around Agent's desktops to rearrange the list to your liking.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

How do I recover data from a corrupted database file in Agent 3?

If you are using Agent version 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2, upgrade to the current version, as there is no recovery tool available that works properly with v3 older than 3.3. Version 3.3 adds a built-in database recovery tool. If you are using Agent version 2 or older, see this FAQ entry instead.

In Agent 3.3, select the message folder that has the corrupted database. If you cannot select this folder directly, select the it with the surrounding folders by clicking on the one just above it and then holding the Shift key click on the one immediately below it. Then from the File menu, select the Repair Selected Folders command. This starts a wizard to guide you through the repair process.

You can choose to repair a damaged folder, or recover deleted messages, or both. You can tell it to just do it, or you can tell it to only analyze for results but not to actually recover anything. Other options include recovering only messages with bodies because you may not be interested in items with only headers, only complete messages because Agent will re-use space marked as available which can lead to messages being partly overwritten when they've been deleted or corrupted, and to mark recovered items as unread so you can easily find them. As always, you can click the Help button for more detailed information about the options.

When you click the Next button, the wizard will start to work. There will be two progress bars at the top showing you the progress over all and for the current folder. Under that will be the list of results showing you the folder name and the name of the database file pair, the number of messages in the folder before the wizard ran, how many of them were valid before the wizard ran, how many damaged messages were repaired by the wizard, how many deleted messages were recovered, and the new total of messages after the wizard ran.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.22.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I set a specific Persona for a folder?

After you create one or more Personas, you assign them to folders from the Properties for the folder(s) in question.

Folder | [Default] Properties | Posting Messages | Personas. From here, you set the Persona to be used for each of the three message types Agent can make: one for Email messages, and two for Usenet messages: one for posts/responses to usenet and one for email responses to a received usenet message.

Default Properties affects email and newsgroup folders. Properties overrides the defaults for the selected folder(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.31.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I set the message view for my folders? Can I set them independently?

You set the message view through the View | Custom Message View menu. You can also place the Message View commands on the toolbar via the program's Options panels.

Message views are saved per folder type, not per folder. There are seven folder types:

• Drafts
• General Purpose
• Mail
• Newsgroup
• Outbox
• Sent
• Trash

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

How do I set up Agent 3.3 for SSL?

Starting with version 3.2, Agent supports SSL for all three types of servers. To enable SSL, all you have to do is select the option in the Servers And Accounts configuration panel for the server in question. Agent will automatically set itself to use the standard SSL port for that type of service. If you need to use a non-standard port, you can change it via the Advanced Settings button for the server in question.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I set up multiple POP3 accounts or servers?

Configuring multiple POP3 accounts or servers is done in exactly the same way as configuring for multiple usenet accounts or servers.

From Tools | Servers And Accounts, click the New button, this will give you a two-item menu, to choose making a new email account or news server, select the email account option. This will start a Create Email Account and Servers Wizard to guide you through the process. Just follow the steps in the wizard. If you have any questions about any of the options, click the Help button on the wizard to see the documentation for that specific panel.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.31.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I subscribe to newsgroups? Where is the group list?

The full list of newsgroups is in the Newsgroup Directory, and you can assign newsgroups to your folders list from there.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

How do you configure multiple SMTP servers?

Configuring multiple SMTP accounts or servers is done in exactly the same way as configuring for multiple POP3 accounts or servers.

From Tools | Servers And Accounts, click the New button, this will give you a two-item menu, to choose making a new email account or news server, select the email account option. This will start a Create Email Account and Servers Wizard to guide you through the process. Just follow the steps in the wizard. If you have any questions about any of the options, click the Help button on the wizard to see the documentation for that specific panel.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.31.06, please give us your feedback.

How does the Task Manager work?

The Task Manager displays your active tasks, completed tasks, and shows the data from the error log. The Completed Tasks and Error panels are informational only, you cannot change or edit the contents, though you can adjust the column widths.

The Active Task panel, however, is there to show you what is currently going on, and to allow you to change it. From here, you can pause or cancel any selected task or selected group of tasks, or all tasks. You can reorder the tasks by moving selected item(s) up or down either one place at a time or directly to the top or bottom. Each item in the Active Task panel has its own progress indicator. As your online resources become available, you will have more than one task processing simultaneously.

The tasks listed are in the format of "<server nickname>/<group name>" where <server nickname> is the display name you gave for the server in question.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

I have more than one instance of Agent for email. How do I combine all the filters into one copy?

There is a filter export/import utility that will consolidate email and usenet filters into one instance of Agent 3.x. This utility has been created by the user community, and not by Forte. Please read the text files thoroughly, including the warnings and the section about feedback. This 3rd party utility is not affiliated with Forte and so we cannot provide support.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.03.06, please give us your feedback.

I just don't understand the whole 'desks and folders' thing. Please explain it to me...

We now use the generic term "Folder" for all of Agent's message containers, be they for a newsgroup, email, or generic message storing, or any of the other folder types Agent 3.3 uses. This is a change from previous versions when we specifically distinguished a "Folder" as not a newsgroup message container. Where it may be tricky at first is when used in combination with the "Desks".

As discussed elsewhere in this FAQ, you can have multiple Desks for multiple purposes, and you can assign folders to more than one Desk. This provides you with an incredible amount of flexability in how you want to organize your message folders.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

Installing Agent 3 as a new program

1. Run Agent setup executable
   • If you are running Windows XP SP2, you may receive a "Open File - Security Warning". Click on the "Run" button to accept our digital signature. NOTE: In order to launch this dialog, Windows Explorer will attempt to connect to comodoca.com, the signing authority. If Windows Explorer is blocked from accessing the Internet, you may experience a delay getting this security prompt.
2. On the Welcome screen, choose "This is a new install."
3. Choose a destination directory and click Next
   • By default, Agent will be installed to the directory C:\Program Files|Agent. You can select another directory by clicking the "Browse" button
4. Choose any additional character sets (English is included by default) and click Next
5. Choose whether you want to create start menu shortcuts and click Next
   • If you choose to create shortcuts, select a Start Menu Program Folder and click Next
6. On the Ready to Install screen, verify setup summary information and click Start
7. On the Installation Complete screen, click Finish. This will start Agent
8. Read and accept the License Agreement
9. In the Forte Agent Trial dialog, select your option. If you have already purchased Agent, select the first option, hit next, then enter your registration key as requested
10. Follow the instructions on the startup wizard

Go to Help | Getting Started for pointers on how to start using Agent 3.3.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

It takes a long time for the installer to start

Our installer file is now digitally signed (see this FAQ entry) to guard against forgeries. Some versions of Windows will attempt to connect to the signing authority in the digital signature to verify the file. If Windows Explorer is blocked from accessing the Internet, or if the remote server is down, it may take several minutes for the connection to time out. Windows will not proceed with the installation until it either verifies the signature or the connection attempt times out.

Once that happens, the installation will be able to proceed.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

My email provider says to use SSL, but I can't connect to the SMTP server

Your SMTP server may require the use of the StartTLS command instead. This is a variation of SSL where an unsecured inital connection is made first to establish the raw connection and then a command is sent to the server to switch to a secured connection to send and receive data. Agent 3.2 did not support this, but starting with 3.3 Agent now does.

To do this in Agent, select the SMTP server in Tools | Servers And Accounts | Outbound Email Servers and select the appropriate setting in the Connection drop-down box. Your choices are to not use a secure connection, to connect securely on the standard SSL port, to connect securely with TLS "if available" and to connect securely with TLS and "fail if unavailable". What those last two mean is "if available" will revert to a non-secured connection if the StartTLS command is rejected, but "fail if unavailable" will fail to complete the task with an error message.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.14.06, please give us your feedback.

Retrieve new email and usenet at the same time?

The command to get new headers has never in and of itself caused Agent to retrieve email. This has always been an implied action according to your settings in the Checking For Email settings panel. If you had Agent version 1.x or version 2 set to retrieve your email automatically, it will still do this according to your time interval setting in the Tools | Options | Inbound Email | Checking For Email panel. If you are on a broadband connection, then leave the option immediately below (Check only when dial-up connection is open) unchecked.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.19.05, please give us your feedback.

Task logs: How do I clear them?

You can control if and how much Agent will log the task history for the Completed Tasks and the Error Log through settings in the Task Settings panel, which is accessed through the Tools | Options | Online Operation menu. You can also set Agent to clear these logs when it closes when logging is enabled.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.03.05, please give us your feedback.

The menus are different

As part of the redesign of Agent, we have changed the way the menus are organized. We think that the new menus are grouped into more logical sets. You can find a description of the new menu layout in the Help file: Help | Index and select Menu commands from the list.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Unread count position

You can place the folder's unread count to the left of the folder name if you prefer the old display via Tools | Options | Display | Folders Pane

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.19.05, please give us your feedback.

What's the difference between 'removing' and 'deleting' a desk or folder?

When you remove a Folder, you are only removing it from the current Desk. When you delete a Folder, it's completely gone from Agent. When you delete a Desk, you are removing the Desk, but not any of the Folders assigned to it, they will remain in any other Desk they've been assigned to, specifically including the All Folders desk, which contains every folder you have in Agent.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

What are 'Personas' and how would I use them?

Personas is what we call the feature that allows you to define different identities to use in email and usenet.

Do you have multiple email addresses and you want the software to know which one to use as your return address? Define a Persona for each and assign the Persona to one or more folders, email or usenet or both, in Agent. Do you use mailing lists, and want Agent to treat it like a newsgroup and just know the address of the group when you post from the folder you have its messages filed to? Define a Persona for it and assign it to that folder.

In a Persona, you can define many message attributes. You can, naturally, define your own name and email address to be used as your identity, but you can also define here default signatures to be used for new messages and replies, whether the Persona can be used for email, usenet, email responses to usenet posts, or any combination of the three. You can also set any/all user-editable headers including custom headers, and if you use more than one outbound email server, you can also define which one the Persona will use.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.31.06, please give us your feedback.

What are the keyboard shortcuts, or some of the shortcuts have changed

Yes, several of the keyboard shortcuts have changed in Agent 3. If you find that you can no longer control Agent with your remembered set of shortcuts, you can find the updated list of keyboard shortcuts in the Help file: Help | Index | keyboard shortcuts.

Probably the most prominent change here is that email-reply and newsgroup-followup are now both started with the R key, and is simply called Reply.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

What files are no longer needed by Agent 3?

Files that previous versions of Agent created that are no longer used by Agent 3 include the groups.*, grp*.bak and outbox.* pairs, and the layout.dat file in the database directory.

Some notes:
The groups.* file pair is superseded by the new groupdir.dat file, the outbox.* pair is superseded by a normal folder dat/idx pair, and the settings in layout.dat will be obsolete after you change and save your layout, the new layout will be saved to the agent.ini file instead.

In case you still have them laying around, the old dictionary files that can be deleted are the ones without the '5' in the name. For example, the name of the English (American) dictionary files are mainenu5.* in your program directory and custenu5.tlx in your database directory.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

What is the 'agent.exe.manifest' file?

If you are using Windows XP, 'manifest' files make the named program conform to your active system theme. Your scrollbars, button styles, menu styles, etc, will have the same visual style as the rest of your system. If you delete the agent.exe.manifest file, nothing bad will happen, but Agent, particularly the toolbars, will look a little dated. If you are not using Window XP, the agent.exe.manifest file does nothing for you.

If you are interested in the technicals, it's merely an XML formatted configuration file. You shouldn't edit it unless you know the specific syntax of these files.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

What is the Newsgroup Directory?

The Newsgroup Directory is where you will find the complete list of newsgroups you have available. From here, you can add groups to a Desk by either using the Add Newsgroups to Desks... wizard or draging the group(s) directly to a desk in Agent's main display. This is also where you can update the groups list via the Update Directory wizard. You can show and update groups for all of your configured servers at once, or by selecting only those that you want to.

Note that Free Agent only allows for a single newsserver to be configured.

The Newsgroup Directory can be opened from the Tools menu.

Please use the Help button on the Newsgroup Directory window for detailed information.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.20.06, please give us your feedback.

What is this "Limit body retrieval rate" setting?

When you retrieve more than 7 or so per second, the UI may get sluggish. The following factors can affect the rate at which bodies are retrieved:

• the speed of your Internet connection
• how many connections your news servers allow
• how many servers you retrieve bodies from simultaneously
• how big the bodies are (small text bodies make the problem worse because you naturally can get more of them faster)

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Where did my All Groups list go? Why doesn't All Folders show me all the newsgroups?

Agent now uses a Newsgroup Directory to contain the complete list of newsgroups you have available. You can open the Newsgroup Directory via the Tools menu. The All Folders desk only lists the message folders and newsgroups you have configured to hold or retrieve messages.

Please see this entry for more about the Newsgroup Directory.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Why am I seeing responses to me before my own posts?

If you have Agent set to file replies in the same folder as the original message (Group | Default Properties | Posting Messages), this copy is files in a marked as read state, and responses are threaded to this copy, not the copy of your message that you subsequently download.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Why can't I delete the 'All Folders' Desk?

You cannot delete the All Folders Desk because that is the Desk that actually contains the folders, all other Desks that you may create merely hold shortcuts to the folders.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Why can't I download more than one body at a time?

Agent will download as many message bodies at one time as you have available connections. If it looks like you are only downloading one message body and you have, for example, four connections available from the server, check to see what it is that you are downloading.

Agent downloads multipart sections in parallel, but the status display shows the main body activity only. This means that if the multipart item has at least as many sections as you have available connections, then Agent will show only one item being downloaded, because it's using all the connections on that one multipart item.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.27.05, please give us your feedback.

Why would I want multiple 'Desks'?

One very good reason to use multiple Desks is to organize your list of folders into categories. These categories can be based on anything you want. Some suggestions include, but are certainly not limited to, Desks specific for email folders, folders for newsgroups you always read and newsgroups you occasionally read.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Windows Explorer contacts comodoca.com when I install Agent 3

Forté is now providing a digitially signed installation file to guard against bogus installers. When you run a signed program file in Windows XP sp2, it will attempt to contact the signing authority that issued the certificate to verify the authenticity, and this will show up in your firewall or network logs as coming from Windows Explorer. Comodoca is the certificate signing authority we are using.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Can I finally import an address book into Agent?

Yes, you can. As of Agent version 4, you can import address book info from other email clients. Agent 4 supports importing addressbook info in either csv or xml format.

The xml format used by Agent is described in details on our web site here: http://www.forteinc.com/spec/addressbook.php. Also, if the xml you wish to import is named "aabimport.xml" Agent will automatically import it when the program starts.

The csv format is less structured. Just make sure that the first line contains the field names, and Agent will be able to import it. If your mail client does not have an option to export to a csv file, you can use Dawn to extract it. Dawn supports most email address books and can convert them to CSV.

Currently, Agent only exports its address book into xml format. Exporting to csv will be added later.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.21.06, please give us your feedback.

Can I kill-filter messages posted to a specific newsgroup?

Yes. As of Agent 4, you can now create a usenet filter based on the Newsgroups header. To filter on this, simply enter "Newsgroups: " in the expression editor like you would "Author: " or "Subject: ", and the name of the newsgroup. You can also use a usenet filter to control crossposts. Here is an example:

     newsgroups: ({\,.+\,.+\,.+\,} and warez)

That will filter based on a message being crossposted to four or more newsgroups where at least one of which has the word 'warez' in the name.

NOTES: A new filter based on the Newsgroups will not be applied immediately when created, these expressions only work on message headers as they are being downloaded. This is because the Newsgroups header does not actaully exist in the overview data, so Agent simulates it based on other overview data. This other overview data does not exist either if you have set Agent to use the XHDR command instead. By default, Agent does not use the XHDR command.

For more on how Agent 4 can manage crossposts, see the FAQ entry "How does the new crosspost detection in Agent 4 work?".

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.14.06, please give us your feedback.

Does Agent post in HTML?

While Agent 4 can now render received HTML messages, Agent does not compose HTML messages. When you reply to an HTML message, Agent uses the plain text version of the message, if there is one. If there isn't one, Agent converts the HTML to plain text and uses that.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I control the image viewing in Agent 4?

Agent 4 can optionally display image attachments as thumbnails in the message body pane and/or a separate Image Preview pane.

To control the display in the message body pane, go to Tools | Options | Display | Message Body Images. Here, you can control whether or not Agent will display thumbnails when the image is sent as an attachment and/or when they are inline. (Usenet binaries are almost always attachments, whereas a lot of email image binaries are inline.) You can also set the zoom factor to control how large the thumbnails can be. If you set it to measure in pixels, the thumbnail will always be a maximum of that size regardless of the size of your message body pane. If you set it to measure as a percentage, the size will be compared to the current size of the body pane. (Your message body pane has two sizes: when the pane is maximized/zoomed, and when in the classic three-pane view.

To control the display of the Image Preview pane, go to Tools | Display | Image Prevew. The options on this settings panel should be pretty self-explanitory. Also, when the preview pane is enabled to be seen, you can toggle it on and off via the <F7> key, and you can instantly maximize and restore the pane via the <F8> key.

See http://www.forteinc.com/agent-features/image-preview.php for screen shots and some additional information.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I get the spam to be marked as read? How do I set Agent to not alert me to new spam?

Select the Junk folder and then open its Properties via Folder | Properties and then Receiving Messages | When To Mark Read. In the "Email Unread Marks" box, enable the option to override the default, then enable the option to "Mark messages read when routed to this folder". This will mark all messages automatically filed or routed to that folder as read.

Now, to have Agent not alert you to new spam being received, go to Tools | Options | Inbound Email | Checking For Email and enable the item "Only if new messages were marked unread".

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.23.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I merge multiple address book from Agent 3 or older into Agent 4?

Unlike merging message databases, there is no automatic way to do this. But it can be done manually.

1. Close Agent and if there is a contact.xml file in the database, move it to another directory. Make sure there is a personal.aab file in the database and start Agent. Agent will import the old address book and create a new one. Close Agent.
2. Move the new contact.xml to another directory. Do not overwrite any other contact.xml files
3. Copy the next personal.aab file to Agent 4.x and start Agent. It will import the old address book into a new one. Close Agent.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 as often as necessary, making sure to either rename each subsequent contact.xml to a unique name (contact1.xml, contact2.xml, etc) or move them to separate directories. Leave the last one created in the database. Close Agent if it's still running.
5. When done with the above, rename a moved contact.xml to aabimport.xml and move it into the database directory. Start Agent. It will be imported and merged with your new address book.
6. Repeat step 5 until you've merged all variations of your old addressbook data.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.13.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I turn HTML rendering on or off?

On HTML messages, there should be at least two status icons on the left edge of the Message Body Pane bar. The left-most is the normal message body status indicator, the next one over is the HTML status: If present, there is HTML in the message. If "lit", you're looking at the rendered message, if "grey", you're looking at the plain-text version.

If you wish to launch the HTML into your web browser, just hit <CTRL L>.

To toggle the HTML rendering on and off, you can find the command in the View menu.

To configure the base HTML display options, go to Tools | Options | Message Body Pane and make your selections in the middle of the panel.

To configure the download of online graphics for HTML messages, go to Folder | [Default] Properties | Receiving Messages | HTML Messages. Default Properties affects all folders. Properties overrides the defaults for the selected folder(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.02.06, please give us your feedback.

How does subthread filtering work?

Subthread filtering in Agent 4 is intended to enable you to Ignore subthreads while leaving the rest of the thread unaffected.

Example: You are interested in a topic, but one branch, or subthread, has wandered off into something you're not interested in or was invaded by a "troll", so you have no interest in reading responses within that part of the main thread. So, just press the i key to Ignore that message and Agent will also Ignore all responses to that message. NOTE: that is i and not I. Lower case ignores the current message and its responses, while uppercase will ignore the entire thread from the beginning.

This works even on threads that have a Watch filter in place.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

How does the new crosspost detection in Agent 4 work?

Crosspost management in Agent 4 is no longer limited by a cache file. Instead of comparing the new message against a database of other messages, Agent 4 simply looks at the message's list of newsgroups and compares it against itself and your list of message folders in one or both of two possible built-in methods:

• You set it so that if a message has been crossposted to at least a number of groups to kill it
• If a message is posted to two or more groups that you are subscribed to, you can choose whether to retrieve or kill the duplicates and (this is the neat part), you tell Agent which one is the "top" group by the order of the message folders in a user-specified desk

Additionally, you can kill filter messages that are crossposted to any specific newsgroup your server carries. See the FAQ entry "Can I kill-filter messages posted to a specific newsgroup?" for details.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

How does the new Junk filtering work?

The junk filter new in Agent 4 uses Bayesian Statistical Analysis to determin what is and what is not junk. The filter start off knowing nothing, it learns as you teach it. When something is routed to a message folder that is really junk, simply move it to the Junk folder, and Agent will train itself that that message, and messages like it, are junk. If a message is routed to the Junk folder that really isn't, simply move it to where it should go and Agent will train itself that that message, and messages like it, are not junk.

The junk filter considers your Contact List to be a whitelist, and will not even look at messages from contacts in your Contact List, unless the "Detect Junk messages sent by this contact" setting is enabled on that specific contact's record. This works for individual contacts, mailing list records and domain records in the contact list. More information and screen shots can be found here: http://www.forteinc.com/agent-features/junk-filtering.php.

Describing how Bayesian analysis works on a technical level is beyond the scope of this document. Google and Yahoo are your friends.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

How many different types of Folders are there? What do they do? Why are there so many?

There are ten types of folders in Agent:

Message Folders

• Newsgroup folder
• Binary newsgroup folder
• Email folder
• General purpose folder

• Junk folder
• Inbox folder
• Outbox folder
• Sent folder
• Drafts folder
• Trash folder

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

The URL in the status bar does not match the displayed link I'm hovering over. Is it safe to click?

That depends on what the URL shown in the status bar is. As part of the "Safe rendering" of HTML in Agent, it does not process label commands for hovering over a link. When you hover the cursor over a link in an HTML email shown in Agent, the URL shown in the status bar is the URL that will be sent to your web browser. So if the link says PayPal and the status bar says PayPal, it'll take you to PayPal and not some scammer looking for your password.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

What are the Task Priorities?

There are now six priorities for retrieving messages. They are, from top to bottom:

Top	Any tasks submitted with the SHIFT key pressed
Small Posts	Tasks to post Usenet messages that have no attachments
Small Bodies	Tasks to retrieve Usenet message bodies for which every body being retrieved has fewer than lines (user-definable in the Usenet Tasks settings panel)
Headers	Tasks to retrieve Usenet headers
Ad Hoc Bodies	Tasks to retrieve bodies invoked manually by the user, that aren't otherwise designated Small Body tasks
Bottom	All other tasks

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

What do you mean by "safe" HTML rendering?

What we mean is that Agent 4 only parses layout commands and displays graphics only. All other HTML tags are simply ignored. Specifically, this means that Agent will not render or process scripts (ActiveX nor Java), nor will it render forms.

Also, Agent will not automatically retrieve linked images from the server unless you have told it to retrieve such images in the contact record for the sender in your Contact List. You can always manually tell Agent to retrieve the images, there will be an adviser bar at the top of the message body pane to let you know that it has not retrieved images. Naturally, images that were sent with the message will be displayed, if you are viewing the message with HTML enabled. More information and screenshots can be found here: http://www.forteinc.com/agent-features/safe-html.php.

Agent will display HTML only if the HTML viewer is enabled in the View menu. If it's not on, Agent will instead display the plain-text version of the message, if present. If there is no plain-text version, Agent will convert the HTML to plain text and display that.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

What does Route By Identity mean?

Route By Identity is the name of the set of features that will cause your inbound email to be routed to folders based on Contact List records instead of email filters. Like the new junk filter, this feature learns how you want messages to be routed by what you do with them. To teach it that an email from your brother, for example, should be in your "Family" folder instead of your default Inbox, simply move it there, and answer the question Agent will ask you. When you tell it to always route that contact to that folder, it will do so. You can Route By Identity individual contacts, entire domains, and mailing lists.

You can have contacts assigned to multiple folders. If you do, you can tell Agent to use content analysis to enhance RBI. This setting is in Tools | Options | Inbound Email | Junk and Routing. This is also where you enable Route By Identity so it will work at all.

When RBI is enabled, you enable it for the specific email folders via Folder | Properties | Receiving Messages | Email Training.

More information and screen shots can be found here: http://www.forteinc.com/agent-features/rbi.php.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.23.06, please give us your feedback.

What happened to Free Agent?

Free Agent has been discontinued. We're sorry, but version 3.3 of Agent is the last version to have a freeware mode. If you do not register Agent 4 by the end of the 30 day trialware period, it will no longer perform any online action. You will, of course, be able to access the program itself and any data stored in it, and you will be able to register it at any time to re-enable online functionality.

Forté has offered Free Agent for more than 10 years. With the release of Agent 4.0 we have decided to retire Free Agent and focus on providing Agent customers with exciting new features and timely upgrades.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.19.06, please give us your feedback.

What is a folder scheme?

A folder scheme, called Property Schemes in Agent, is a saved set of folder properties, and are functionally in between Folder Properties and Folder Default Properties in that they override the default properties and can be overriden in turn by the individual folders. They are accessed via Folder | Property Schemes. You can have any number of Property Schemes.

The beauty of them is that you can configure Agent to automatically apply a Property Scheme to new folders based on their type or keywords in their names. For instance, you can configure a scheme for music binary newsgroups and another for video binary newsgroups, another for email folders, and one for everything else, and have them applied automatically simply because one newsgroup has the word "music" in it, one has the word "multimedia" in it and one has the "email folder" type assigned to it.

See http://www.forteinc.com/agent-features/folder-schemes.php for more information and screen shots.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

Agent crash on start-up occurs if you close Agent with no windows open and then try to restart it

This crash occurs if you close Agent with no windows open and then try to restart it.

Agent 5.0 build 1171 fixes the bug. Free upgrade for 5.0 users. Download the upgrade here from our download page.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.22.08, please give us your feedback.

Problems with folder names

With the addition of nested folders in version 5, several punctuation marks are no longer allowed in folder names. These are the slash, the backslash and the comma. This is because these characters are now relevent to the system and thus are reserved.

If any folders had these characters in them when you upgraded from a prior version of Agent, automatic filing to them will fail, and trying to select them from a picklist will also likely fail. You will have to rename these message folders without the punctuation. We appologize for the inconvenience.

If you are trying to create a new message folder in Agent version 5 with these punctuation characters in it, you will get an error. Simply create the folder without such characters.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.22.09, please give us your feedback.

What View commands are disabled when "Disable view menu keyboard shortcuts" is enabled?

When you enable the option Disable view menu keyboard shortcuts located in Tools | Options | Display | Main Window, the following View menu commands will have their keyboard shortcuts disabled:

• Word Wrap
• Show All Header Fields
• Display HTML Content
• Abbreviate Usenet Subjects
• Display as Raw Message
• Show All Fields (on the composition window)
• Zoom

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.17.08, please give us your feedback.

Why can't I sort selected folders by name anymore?

With the addition of nested folders, the programming for sorting selected folders was just too cumbersome. What happens now conforms to Windows standard behavior. The selected items and all other items at the same level will be sorted by name. Child and parent items are untouched. We hope, but do not guarantee, that sorting selected items will return in a future version.

If you want to sort selected items by name in the current version, you can do so either manually by dragging the folders into the order you want, or you can place them into a new Desk, sort them by name there, and then move them back.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.17.08, please give us your feedback.

After upgrading to 6.0, I get the error: "Compressed header data from server was damaged"

This error is most likely caused by a conflict with giganews accelerator. If you are using the accelerator program it is no longer necessary and you should use Agent's compressed header capability instead. Agent 6.0 has header compression enabled in the program itself, so you won't need the accelerator program any more. Agent by itself will get the headers 10 times faster now, without giganews accelerator. If for some reason you aren't using the giganews program, let me know and we can keep on trying to get this sorted out.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.21.09, please give us your feedback.

Does Agent 6.0 support the hiding of Quoted Text?

Yes. Quoted text can be hidden by enabling this option in Agent 6.0. Select Tools | Options | Display | Message Body Pane and enter the number of lines to display of the quoted text to display. The option can be set to display the first X lines and the last X lines.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

How does the Agent 6.0 Bodies download failover work?

While getting Usenet bodies from a newsgroup Agent, as always, will honor the access plan specified for that group. Agent 6.0 adds a new access plan option, When an error occurs, failover to the next server in the plan to the News Access Plan panel of the Default Properties and Properties dialogs. Here's a simple explanation for how this works:

Say you have servers A and B enabled in your access plan. You start retrieving a message body from server A (as specified in your access plan), which then, for some reason, fails. Agent will pause body retrieval from server A and start retrieving body sections from server B. However, while retrieving bodies from server B Agent will periodically attempt to resume retrieving bodies from server A, and if successful will switch back to using server A.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.16.09, please give us your feedback.

What is header compression, why is it a good thing and does Agent support it?

Header downloads for large newsgroups can be time consuming and expensive. Many service providers, including Forte's APN, now offer header downloads in a compressed format, resulting in downloads up to ten time faster than with the older non-compressed format. Agent 6.0 supports compressed header downloads. By default this option is enabled. If for some reason you don't want this, open your news server panel, Click the "Advanced" button and uncheck the "...header compression" box.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

A uuencoded message wasn't decoded. How do I decode it?

First, ensure that you have Detect uuencoded messages automatically checked in the Folder | Default Properties | Receiving Messages | File Handling tab, and make sure that it's not overwritten in the folder's own specific properties.

If you have already received the message, you'll need to save the file to text using the File | Save Messages As option, and then import the message back into Agent with the above setting on. You cannot import messages with Free Agent.

You should now be able to right click on the message, choose Index, and save the uuencoded message from this dialog.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.21.08, please give us your feedback.

A yEnc encoded message wasn't decoded. How do I decode it?

Please see the FAQ entry Attachments appear as blocks of code instead of icons.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Attachments appear as blocks of code instead of as icons.

Press CTRL+R; it's a toggle (the current state of which is shown by the presence or absence of a checkmark against the Display as Raw Message command on the View menu).

If the above does not resolve the problem, check to see what encoding the attachment is. If there is a line at the top of the data block that looks like this example:

    =ybegin part=1 line=128 size=14323712 name=filename.jpg

then you are likely using an old version of Agent or Free Agent. Agent's support of yEnc starts with version 1.91, and Free Agent's started with version 3. Please see our Upgrade Policy to see if you are eligible for an upgrade.

If the above line looks like this instead:

    =ybegin part=1 total=9 li          ne=128size=4656098name=filename.avi

then please read this FAQ entry.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.21.08, please give us your feedback.

BinHex Encoded files? Does Agent support them?

[Free] Agent does not support BinHex. This is actually an Apple/Macintosh standard, not PC/Windows. To decode the file manually, you will need to download the message attachment as text, and then save the message encoded in binhex as a text file, by selecting the message and choosing File | Save Message As....

Once you have saved the attachment to a text file, you will need to use an external decoding program to decode the file. Programs you can use to decode the BinHex encoded file include Stuffit Expander and WinZip.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I forward messages with attachments?

You can forward messages with attachments by using the Forward As Attachment command in the Action | Forward Special menu. This will take the entire message, including any existing attachments, and send it as an attachment to a new outbound message.

Or you can save the attachments, use the regular Forward command, and re-attach the files to the new outbound message.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.30.07, please give us your feedback.

How do I handle files with rar or rXX extensions?

These are WinRAR files. The poster has pre-processed the file with RAR to split the item into smaller pieces, more suitable for transmission in Usenet. You will need a copy of WinRAR to recombine these files into their original form. This has nothing to do with Agent, or any news client. Think of rar files as you would a zip file.

You can get WinRAR from www.rarlab.com.

We have more information about downloading binary files in Agent on our Guide To Binaries page.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.23.07, please give us your feedback.

How do I save inline files?

You need to edit your AGENT.INI file:

[Article] SaveNamedInlines=0 (change this to a 1)

When this value is non-zero, if a MIME section has a filename, Agent will display the yellow icon for the message and will save the section when you select the File | Save All Attachments menu item.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I specify file types other than text be non-encoded when sending messages?

There are two ways of doing this.

When you are attaching the file to the message (by clicking on the Attachments button while in the composition window) select the file, then change the type of data field to "text/plain".

Or you can use the File | Insert Text File command to insert the file into the message body at the current cursor location.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

I get a disk out of space error saving an attachment, yet I have oodles of free space

You can get an error complaining about the hard drive being full even though you have many gigabytes of free space left due to limitations of the way Windows manages the hard drive's file system. There are basically two different methods used by Windows for this, and which one your computer is using depends, with one exception, on which version of Windows you are using.

Windows 95 SR2, Windows 98, and Windows ME all use FAT32 for disk management. Windows NT4, and Windows XP use NTFS for disk management. Windows 2000 may have been installed using either FAT32 or NTFS, depending on where you got it. The technical differences between FAT32 and NTFS is beyond the scope of this article. What is important here is that NTFS allows for larger hard drives, larger individual files, and more files per folder than FAT32.

The following information about the capacities of the two file systems is taken from the Windows Network & .NET Magazine site:

FAT32 (Win9X or newer):

• Maximum disk size: 2 terabytes
• Maximum single file size: 4 gigabytes
• Maximum files per folder: 65,534 (Note: using Long File Names will reduce this number - the more LFN files you have, the fewer you can have)

NTFS (WinNT, 2K, XP, servers):

• Maximum disk size: 256 terabytes
• Maximum single file size: size of disk
• Maximum files per folder: 4,294,967,295

If you are interested in a deeper technical comparison between FAT32 and NTFS, here is a Google search.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.24.04, please give us your feedback.

I get an error when I try to launch a file from Agent, but it works when I launch it from Windows

If you can correctly launch the file by double-clicking the same type of file in Windows Explorer, then go to Agent's Tools | Options | URL And MIME Types | MIME Types and remove the configuration for that file type there. If you had set the type "application/octet-stream" or any of the other default types that cannot be deleted, clear the Application and Extensions fields. Agent then will use Windows to launch the file directly, as if you were launching the file from Windows Explorer.

If you get the wrong application or an error when you double-click the file in Windows Explorer, check with the technical support people for the application that should be used when launching the file. You may have to reinstall the application to reset the file associations.

If the above does not work, then do a partial reversal of the above and make a setting for the file type. Go to Tools | Options | URL And MIME Types | MIME Types. Click the Add button and add the type and subtype of the problem file type, click OK. Then select the new item and enter the file extension(s) used for that kind of file, in a comma separated list. Do not enter an application. When you click Apply, it should show an application icon for the handler in the space under the Application line.

You can find a reasonably complete MIME Type listing cross-referenced to file extensions at <http://www.w3schools.com/media/media_mimeref.asp>.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.08.07, please give us your feedback.

I get an "unable to create file" error when I try to save or launch an attachment

This error means that the path you have defined for saving or launching attachments does not exist.

Go to Folder \ [Default] Properties \ Attachment Folders and use the Browse buttons to make sure that the directory paths are correct. Default Properties affects email and all newsgroups. Properties overrides the defaults for the selected newsgroup(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.13.03, please give us your feedback.

I just registered Agent and previously downloaded yEnc files are still not recognized

If you downloaded yEnc encoded files while in Free Agent mode, they will not be recognized as files after entering your registration code. The reason for this is that in order for the flag to be set that marks a message as a binary, the message has to be downloaded, or imported, while Agent can recognize that it is a file.

What you will have to do is export the messages as text files via File | Save Messages As... with the options UNIX, Raw, and All Headers, and then import the text file(s) via File | Import Messages.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

I just upgraded to the new Free Agent. Everything is different. How do I...

• Launch a file (view it) by highlighting the message with the file in it and press the keyboard shortcut key 'L' to launch the file, using the menu option: File | Launch Attachment, right clicking the message and choose Launch Attachment, or pressing the Launch Icon on the toolbar
• Save a file (to a directory on your computer) by highlighting the message with the file in it and press the keyboard key 'A' to save all the files in that message, or using the menu option: File | Save all Attachments, or right clicking the message and choose Save all Attachments
• Delete a file (from the directory on your computer) by selecting the menu option: File | Delete Saved Attachments or right clicking the message and choose Delete Saved Attachments
• Delete the body of the message containing the attachment (so I can download it again) by selecting the menu option: Message | Delete body or right clicking the message and then select delete body. You can also use the keyboard shortcut: CTRL+Del

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

I need to Manually Join a Binary Attachment. How can I do that?

Occasionally, you may find multi-part attachments whose subject lines don't match the standard conventions (they might not include the standard "Part 1 of 2" or "[1/2]" notation, for example). In this case, Agent won't be able to find all of the articles for the file or won't be able to get them in the correct order. This may announce itself with a dialog box saying that Agent couldn't find all of the articles, or with an error during the decoding process.

To decode such files, you'll need to select and order the articles manually:

1. Select all of the articles that contain parts of the binary file. You can do this by selecting one article and then Ctrl-clicking on the others to include them. Be sure to select articles for only one binary file; you'll have to repeat this entire process for any others that you want.
2. Select the Message | Join Sections... menu item.
3. Agent will display a dialog box showing the articles you selected. Make sure they are all in order - if they aren't, use the Up and Down buttons to order them correctly.
4. Launch or decode the attachment by pressing the corresponding button. If you are offline and have not yet retrieved the articles, Agent will immediately go online and download them.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.13.02, please give us your feedback.

Is yEnc available in Free Agent 3.3?

Yes. yEnc decoding is now available with the release of Agent 3.2.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

The files I download disappear

You have to actually cause the attachments to be saved. Simply viewing them does not necessarily do this.

You can save them manually with any of the menu (File menu or right-click context menu), keyboard (hit the <A> key) or toolbar commands. Or you can do this automatically with the settings in Group | [Default] Properties | Receive Files. Default Properties affects email and all newsgroups. Properties overrides the defaults for the selected newsgroup(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.24.02, please give us your feedback.

yEnc suddenly stopped being recognized

Some users have reported this issue began after the install or upgrade of Zone Alarm version 5.1. Have you just installed or upgraded to this version? Users have reported there is a problem in Zone Alarm 5.1 that is causing it to mangle yEnc encoded file attachments. It's doing this by taking spaces from the latter half of the =ybegin line and inserting them in the middle of a keyword. This makes a line that should look like this:

=ybegin part=1 total=9 line=128 size=4656098 name=Blood For Blood - A Postcard From The Edge.mp3

look like this instead:

=ybegin part=1 total=9 li          ne=128size=4656098name=BloodForBlood-APostcardFromTheEdge.mp3

The only way to deal with this is to replace the problem version of Zone Alarm. On November 8, 2004, Zone Labs released version 5.5 which reportedly solves this problem. If you are using Zone Alarm 5.1, please upgrade to 5.5 immediately to solve this, and other, problems.

If you are interested in the list of fixes and changes, you can find it on their web site here.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.09.04, please give us your feedback.

All my messages and folders dissappeared. Agent is empty.

If you are using Windows XP and you have multiple computer logon profiles, make sure that Agent is not open in another user profile.

Otherwise, with Agent closed, open your database directory in Windows Explorer and verify that you have the grpdat.bak and grpidx.bak files. Assuming you do, delete groups.dat and groups.idx and copy grpdat.bak to groups.dat and grpidx.bak to groups.idx.

These are backup files for the master groups listing. Agent creates/updates these files whenever you get group names or import a newsrc file. If you attempt to get groups while your Groups list is corrupted, the backup files will inherit the corruption.

In some rare cases, this could be caused by a problem with the agent.ini file. As such, it is recommended that you backup this file occasionally. You can do this manually by making a copy of the file periodically. Or, you can automate the process using a batch file. Or, you could rely on the system restore function of your Operating System. If you use this method, check to insure the drive agent is installed to has system restore enabled.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.18.06, please give us your feedback.

How can I reverse the configured Trash settings for specific messages?

Like in a lot of places in Windows, pressing the <SHIFT> key will alter the function of the selected action. For example, in Internet Explorer a <shift click> on a link will open it in a new window. In Agent, if you are configured to use the Trash folder, <shift delete> will instead send the selected message(s) to oblivion.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.04.02, please give us your feedback.

How do I mark and retrieve all messages in certain groups?

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."

This FAQ Entry was updated on 07.15.02, please give us your feedback.

How do the auto-thread-expand options work?

In Options | General Preferences | Message List you will find the settings to control the automatic exanding of threads.

Expand thread if necessary to highlight current body pane message will cause Agent to always expand the current thread in the Message List pane to show the current message.

Initial thread setting controls when Agent will automatically (or not) expand threads in the Message List pane. When skipping to unread followups controls when and how Agent will expand collapsed threads when skipping to an unread message within the thread.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

If I retrieve new headers, but I don't read any messages, how do I prevent the headers from being marked as read?

By selecting Folder | [Default] Properties | Receiving Messages | When To Mark Read and selecting both "Do not mark any existing messages read" items. Default Properties affects email and all newsgroups. Properties overrides the defaults for the selected newsgroup(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.09.06, please give us your feedback.

The arrow keys don't move the selection, they scroll

Check the SCRL indicator in the lower right hand corner of Agent's main window. This can be inconsistent with the Scroll Lock on your keyboard because each pane in Agent maintains its own Scroll Lock status.

If SCRL is visible, hit the Scroll Lock key on your keyboard to turn it off. To then turn off the LED on your keyboard, click on the desktop and hit the key again.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

What does the shaded triangle mean in the Message List pane?

The triangle shows you what column you're sorting on, and whether it's an ascending or descending sort. If the triangle is pointing up, the sort is ascending and if the triangle is pointing down, the sort is descending. These are explained here.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

What does "Catch Up" do compared "Mark All Newsgroups As Read"/"Mark Selected Groups Read"?

Agent remembers the article number of the last message per group it has retrieved from the news server. When you "get new headers", Agent gets all higher-numbered messages. The Online | Catch Up With Selected Groups command queries the server to find out what articles are available and notes their numbers, but does not actually retrieve any headers so that the next time you get headers, you'll only get messages posted since you did the catch up.

The Group| Mark All Newsgepups Read or Group | Mark Selected Groups Read commands simply marks as read all messages that you have already retrieved in the selected groups. It doesn't affect which messages Agent will retrieve the next time you contact the server.

Another way to "catch up" is to open the Default Group Properties dialog and temporarily change the "Limit number of headers per session" value. That way, you can catch up by retrieving, say, no more than 50 of the most recent messages per group.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

What does "Thread" mean in the sort names/descriptions?

There are two ways of grouping related messages, Threaded and Unthreaded. When threaded, messages that are responses to another message are grouped so that a response is directly under the original message. The thread can be collapsed to preserve display space. When not threaded, messages are sorted and displayed individually without regard to any response hierarchy.

In previous versions of Agent, Thread was a separate sort. Now, with Agent 2.0 (and higher), you can sort on different criteria and choose whether messages will be displayed in threaded order or not.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.06.04, please give us your feedback.

What is the difference between Ascending and Descending sorts?

An ascending sort is one that sorts from lowest to highest, such as 1 to 9 or A to Z. Unless you're already familiar with this in other computer applications, it may be confusing because when your sort is ascending, the lower value is actually at the top of the display. This is because you navigate down the list, so the higher values are towards the bottom of the display.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.06.04, please give us your feedback.

When I do a 'Save Message As', why do I only get the message body?

On the File | Save Messages As... dialog box, you need to select either the All Fields or Selected Fields options. If you even think you're going to be re-importing the message into Agent or another reader, select All Fields for maximum compatibility

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Why does it jump when I Mark or Ignore a message?

By default, [Free] Agent automatically skips to the next unread message when you mark a message for retrieval or ignore a thread. If you do not like this behavior, you can disable it by selecting Options | General Preferences | Navigation And Menus | Navigation and clearing the checkmark on the Marking or ignoring a message skips to the next unread message.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Why don't I see the Date or Author fields in the browser?

Most likely the fields have been pushed to the right all the way. To get them back, put the mouse cursor on the header bar, where it says "Subject" and move it over to the right till it's almost near the edge. Now, when it gets to the edge, before it changes into the "re-size window" cursor, it becomes a vertical bar with horizontal arrows. When it becomes the vertical bar with arrows, click hold and drag the cursor to the left. The author and date fields will be returned.

Additionally, in Agent 2.0 you can automatically resize the header bar to make the date section appear. To set auto-resize, choose Options | General Preferences | Display | Message List Pane | [x]automatically adjust column widths when resizing window.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Agent takes a long time to start after saving lots of attachments

If you are a heavy binary downloader, and you have Agent set to save attachments in the default location, Agent may eventually start to take longer and longer to load.

To fix this, clean out the saved attachments from their current location and change your settings in Group \ [Default] Properties \ Attachment Folders so that the "Folder for saving attached files" is some location other than your Agent program or data directory. Default Properties affects email and all newsgroups. Properties overrides the defaults for the selected newsgroup(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.16.04, please give us your feedback.

Are Menu options different in the translated versions of Agent?

Yes. There are a couple of minor differences in the layout of some of the menus in the different translated versions of Agent. These changes are for the most part cosmetic only, and were required by the language specific conventions used in the translations. This also includes what appears on the right-click context (or speed) menu.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Can I add custom headers in Agent?

Yes, there are several places you can add custom headers.

In ascending order of priority, you can add custom headers to a Persona, to the folder Default Properties, to the folder Properties, and to each individual message at the time of composition.

Note that there are some headers that you cannot control this way. For example, you cannot create custom message-ids nor can you control the timestamp.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.31.06, please give us your feedback.

Can I make Agent automatically dial out in Windows?

Yes, Agent can cause Windows to dial and connect to your dial-up service provider. To do this, you need to configure Agent via Options | General Preferences | Online Operation | Dial-Up Networking to use your system Dial Up Networking connection.

If you do not want Agent to do this, or if you are on an always-on (ie, broadband or LAN) connection, then you do not want to set anything in that settings panel.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Can I use Agent with a DSL, Cable, or other Network connection to the Internet?

To use Agent over a direct (dial-less) connection (cable modem, DSL, LAN, etc) all you have to do is go to Tools | Options | Online Operation | Dial Up Networking and remove the setting to open a dial up connection before going online.

In Agent 2.0, the configuration is Options | User And System Profile | Dial Up. And, of course, set your server information up according to the new servers you will be accessing.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Configuring the server settings for Agent

The news server and it's login settings are set in the Options \ General Preferences \ Servers And Accounts \ News Server panel, the outbound email is set in the Outbound Email Server panel, and the inbound email on the Inbound Email Server panel.

If you are unsure of the information you need, you can find out from your service provider(s) what information is needed in each place.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Default Properties vs. Properties (Can I configure newsgroups differently from each other?)

The Groups | Default Properties Menu is the universal configuration for email (folders) and all newsgroups, both subscribed and unsubscribed. These settings will apply to all newsgroups which have not been specifically overridden.

The Groups | Properties Menu configuration specifically overrides the default properties in those newsgroups (but not folders) which are highlighted when choosing this menu option. This allows you to define specific properties and behavior for these newsgroups. For example, you can create different email addresses for use in different newsgroups, but still have your personal address configured for your personal correspondence.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 06.20.03, please give us your feedback.

Does Agent 6.0 work with Windows 7?

Yes. Agent 6.0 is fully compatible with all versions of Windows 7 including the 64bit Windows 7.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.20.09, please give us your feedback.

Does Agent work with Windows 7?

Yes. All versions of Agent starting with Agent 4.2 will work in Windows 7. When you upgrade, it will prompt you to let it move your database to the new required location.

For older versions, Agent does also work with Windows 7, with some manual setup needed unless you're using an Admin level account on your computer.

If you are using the default access level, you will need to manually move Agent's database location from its default location of C:\Program Files\Agent\data to your computer account's user data area. This is because as a security measure, normal account in Windows 7 does not have full write access to the Program Files location and Agent has been in existence long before Windows 7. Don't forget to fix the shortcut details to match the new "start in" location.

Also, if you are installing Agent onto Windows 7 as a "new" application, uncheck the option to run Agent when the installer finishes, or Windows will confuse the action as being part of the installation process and, with its user-access controls, disallow access to the files later on. Run Agent manually after the installer closes. Upgrade installs do not have this option.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

How do I add additional newsgroup servers to Agent?

To add additional newsgroup servers to Agent, go to Tools | Servers and Accounts, click the New... button and follow the instructions in the Wizard. The Help buttons will bring you to context sensitive help, if needed.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I change the height of the pane headers/tabs?

The pane header bars (or tabs, if you use Agent in zoomed mode) are now sized dynamically to fit the font used. You can change the font via Options | General Preferences | Display | Fonts.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.10.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I change the interface language in Agent 1.93?

To change the interface language of Agent, go to Options | Display Preferences | Main Window and use the Display Language setting. Agent will make available languages that have been installed prior to starting Agent. The list will always include "English (American)". You can have multiple languages installed and switch between them as often as you want, the change will take effect when you restart Agent. Translated versions will be added to our download site as they become available.

To install an interface language, you can either download and run one or more fully translated distribution files or you can download and install just the language resource file(s). If you download the full program, just run it as any other upgrade. All of the translated copies include "English (American)". If you download just the language resource file, download the .dll file directly into your Agent program directory.

Agent 2 has not yet been translated.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I change the port that Agent uses to connect to the server in Agent 1 or 2?

You can change the port settings by editing the AGENT.INI file. Do not let the file word wrap when editing it, or you will destroy several of the longer settings. Here is what to look for in the ini file:

-----begin-----
[Servers]
NNTPPort=119
SMTPPort=25
POPPort=110
SMTPServerPort=25
-----End-----

(That last one is almost never used - only if Agent is set to receive with smtp). Change the numbers to whatever you need, according to your proxy setup.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 07.25.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I change the ports Agent 3 uses to connect to the servers?

If you need to change the port Agent 3 uses to connect to the server, you can do this by going to Tools | Servers And Accounts, selecting the server in question and clicking the Advanced Settings button. Do not do this unless you need to.

If you're setting to use SSL, do that by selecting the secure connection option in the main panel for the server.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 07.25.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I change the sorting in Agent 2?

There are several ways you can change the sort order in Agent 2.

The first way is through the Group | Sort Messages by menu. The menu is arranged so that you can change the sort with a single step. First, you select what column you want to use for sorting, then in the next flyout whether it's ascending or descending and if you want the message list threaded or not.

The second way is to click on the column headers of the Message List Pane. Click the same column header a second time to reverse the sort. The button in the Lines column controls threading. You can see which sort criterion is active as well as the sort direction (ascending or descending) by the position and direction of the shaded triangle.

The third way of changing the sort order is to right-click on the column header you wish to sort by and select the sort you wish to use.

Please refer to Agent's help file for full details on sorting messages in Agent, and how to configure a default sort. You can find this via Help | Index | Sorting.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.06.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I configure Agent for offline operation?

Agent is designed to make offline newsreading as convenient as possible. It can 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, if you are on a time-metered connection, 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 in Agent 2.0 and 1.x, go to Options | General Preferences | Online Operation | General Settings. This configuration panel 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 set Offline Defaults button.

In Agent 3.x, the Offline Defaults button has been removed, but the offline functionality is still available from the menu option Folder | Default Properties | Receiving messages | Usenet messages by checking the 'mark messages for later retrieval' radio button.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.10.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I configure an antispam address for usenet posting?

You can specify different "From:" addresses for Usenet and Email.

To use the correct address for sending email, set your correct information in Tools | Options | Posting Preferences | User Identity. This will also set your userid items in Folder | Default Propeties | Posting Messages.

To set up an anti-spam address for each Usenet group that you post to, go to Folder | Properties | Posting Messages | Fields. You can select all groups at once, if you are configuring the same information for all.

Select From then Override default value for From and enter your anti-spam address.

When you "CC" Usenet posts, the Usenet anti-spam address is used. But when Post New Email Message is used or you reply to an email, the "e-mail" defaults are used.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.02.05, please give us your feedback.

How do I consolidate all my instances of Agent into one copy?

1. Follow the steps in "Installing Agent 4 as an upgrade to 2.0 or older" to upgrade each instance of Agent 2.0 or 1.93 to Agent 4
2. Close all running instances of Agent
3. Decide which instance will be your primary instance. You will be moving data files to this instance
1. If you have an instance with the database in a directory called "data", then make that your primary instance, otherwise, it doesn't matter
2. From each additional Agent instance, move the 0xxxxxxx file pairs to the data directory of the primary instance
   • Note: If you run into a name conflict, make a note of each file that is not copied. Do not overwrite the existing file whem prompted, or you will destroy existing data. Go back to these files in the data directory of the instance you're moving and rename to an arbitrary number that must be in the form 0xxxxxxxx.<dat,idx>. Then move the files
4. Run your primary instance of Agent, the new folders will appear in the Imported Folders desk

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.02.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I Move Agent?

To transfer your settings from one place to another (drive or computer), you will need to move the contents of your database directory. Where this is depends on which version of Agent and which version of Windows you're using. With Agent 4.1 and older and Windows XP or older, by default this is located in "C:\Program Files\Agent\data" but may be elsewhere if you installed Agent to a custom location. With Agent 4.2 or newer, see this FAQ entry: "Where is my Agent database? I can't find the files".

Place the files in a safe location until after installing the new Agent onto your new computer. To install Agent onto the new computer, just download the latest install file (currently for Agent 6.0, selected prior versions are still available) from the Agent Download Page. Once it's downloaded, just double click on it and, if prompted, choose "new install". When it's done, run Agent once and abort the initial config setup and close the program. This will create the database location for you. Then get the previously saved files from above, and place them in the newly created data directory. Now, when you open Agent the settings will be the same as the old computer.

If you cannot transfer the (often) large data files (00*.*), then you can leave those out, you just wont have your message database.

You can transfer the contents of your email folders by selecting all of the messages in a folder and clicking File \ Save Messages As... In the resulting dialog box, choose "UNIX message file," "Save raw" and "All fields." You can append the messages from your other folders to the same file with "Append to existing file." To import these into the new install of Agent, click File \ Import Messages and select the options that suite you best.

You can transfer your address book by copying over your contact.xml file.

You definitely want to copy over your agent.ini file at the very least, as that contains your core configuration options and your registration code.

If you are doing this via a CD-R or other normally Read Only media, you must remember to remove the Read Only flag on all files copied off of the device, or Agent will not be able to use the database.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

How do I run multiple instances of Agent ?

In Agent 4.2 and later, the preferred method to run multiple instances of Agent in Windows 7 or Vista is to specify the database directory on the shortcut's Target line instead of the Start In line. If there are any spaces, enclose the path in quotes, as is normal for Windows.

If Agent is installed in the default location and you are setting up a second instance, the Target command line would look something like this:

    "C:\Program Files\Agent\agent.exe" "C:\My Other Data Folder"

Another change with this is that you no longer need to pre-populate the database location with an agent.ini file when specifying a non-default database location.

If you already have multiple instances setup you do not have to change your shortcuts, the old method still works. But you should use the new method for any new instances you may setup in the future.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

How do I set a default sort in Agent 2?

You can set a default sort in Agent for newsgroups and folders through the Message Sorting preferences panel. This panel is located in the Navigation and Menus section of the Options | General Preferences menu. Please click on the Help button for details about this panel.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.06.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I set older versions of Agent to use a secnews (ssl encrypted) server?

Agent 3.2 and later versions do support SSL, but older versions of Agent, by themself, cannot access a secure/ssl server. You can, however, use a local proxy application like Stunnel to access these. Stunnel can be obtained from <www.stunnel.org>. We cannot help you with the installation and basic configuration of Stunnel, since we are in no way associated with the product. But we can tell you this: To use Agent with it, you will need to configure that instance of Agent to connect to the host 'localhost' or IP 127.0.0.1. Both of these represent your own machine. Agent is not connecting to the remote server, it's connecting to Stunnel. Stunnel then connects to the remote server for Agent.

If you want to connect to more than one secure server, in each instance of Agent that you use stunnel for, change the appropriate port number in agent.ini to something unique, and configre Stunnel accordingly, based on its setup.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 07.26.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I specify the directory for Agent's database?

There are a couple of ways, depending on your setup.

The first and preferred way is via the Start In parameter of the shortcut you use to start Agent. Right-click on the shortcut and select Properties. In the Start In field, enter the path to the directory that contains the agent.ini file. This is how you would set up Agent for multiple servers.

The second way is by using a command line parameter, also in the shortuct. For this method, make sure the Start In field is blank, and add the path to your agent.ini file to the Target field, like this:

"C:\Agent\Agent.exe" "C:\Agent\Data\agent.ini"

This is handy if you use the same database from multiple locations, like on a laptop with two or more connection types, depending on where you are physically, and it would allow you to specify different connection setups.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 04.05.03, please give us your feedback.

How do I upgrade to the latest version of Agent or Free Agent?

See our Agent Install and Upgrade Instructions for a step by step process. If you have questions about which upgrades are free, see our Agent Upgrade Policy.

As always, when you upgrade, you should make a backup copy of your current installation in case anything goes wrong with the upgrade. This allows you to restore the original working directory and prevent any data loss because of catastrophic problems.

To backup your Agent files prior to an upgrade, you need to open the Windows File Manager and change to the Agent directory. The default Agent dirctory is 'C:\Program Files\Agent'. Select the 'Agent' directory, and right click on it, then choose 'copy'. Now change to a temporary holding directory where you will store your backup copy. Right click within this directory, and choose 'paste'. This will copy your entire Agent directory to this temporary location. If there are any issues with your upgrade, you can reverse the copy process and paste the Agent directory back into the original location to restore your copy of Agent to where it was prior to the upgrade.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I use a Different Language version of Agent 1.93?

By installing a file known as a "language resources DLL" you can convert (Free) Agent's user interface to a language other than English. Resource DLLs for a number of languages are available at Forté's web site. See the International Users page for information about the Agent Translations process and downloads. If you've already installed the default English version, you can download the specific resource dll file(s) you need from the All Downloads page.

After you download a Resource DLL, install it by copying the file to the folder containing file AGENT.EXE, which is normally "c:\Program Files\Agent". Then, restart Agent. Agent should automatically display the user interface from the newly-installed DLL.

You can install resource DLLs for more than one language. By default, Agent uses the language for the first DLL it finds in either the DATA folder that contains Agent's database, or in the SHARED folder that contains AGENT.EXE.

To force Agent to use a particular language, or to revert to the English language, go to Options | Display Preferences | Main Window and set the Display Language option.

Agent 2 has not been transated. We haven't forgotten about our international users, but with the massive changes to Agent's code already in 3.3, we decided to hold off on updating the translation toolkit.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

I've changed my web browser, and now I cannot launch URLs from Agent

In your Agent database directory, delete the 'urltype.dat' file and restart Agent. When missing, Agent will on startup rescan the system Registry for your system default URL settings and recreate this file.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

I don't understand the settings in AGENT.INI. Where can I find an explanation of the settings?

A complete breakdown of the agent.ini file is available in the help file by selecting Help | Index, then double clicking on .INI file when it appears in the index list.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

I get a "Publisher cannot be verified" message when installing Agent

This is a new security feature in WinXP Pro SP2. If you use Internet Explorer as your web browser and download files with it, it will now check for a digital signature executable files, and we currently do not digitally sign the install program.

We can assure you that the software you download directly from us is safe regardless of any error messages you may be getting from Windows.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.16.04, please give us your feedback.

I just installed or upgraded Agent and it cannot connect to the server

Are you running a firewall or proxy server? If so, then check its setup. The number 1 cause for this problem when installing or upgrading any network application is that your firewall is blocking the application because it hasn't been told that this is a legitimate install or upgrade and not a trojan change.

How to reconfigure your firewall is dependent on the firewall. If your firewall is "application control" based (Zone Alarm, Sygate Personal Firewall, Norton Personal Firewall/Norton Internet Security, Kerio, etc), the simplest thing to do is to remove the rule for Agent and let the firewall redectect Agent when it goes online, and tell it to always allow the connection attempt. However, we cannot provide specific details on how to do this. If you need help configuring your firewall, you'll have to ask its publisher.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.15.08, please give us your feedback.

I use Agent with Windows XP Fast User Switching and now all my groups are gone. What happened?

If you have multiple user profiles configured on your Windows XP machine, make sure that Agent is not running in another profile. If it was left running when you switched users, this problem will occur. To fix this, simply shut down Agent, switch back to the other user's account and shut down Agent from there. When you switch back to the profile you want to use, you'll be able to open Agent with all of your data.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Installing Agent 4.2 or later as an upgrade to Agent 2.0 or older.

Back up your current data. In addition to this being a general caution when upgrading anything, Agent is not backwards compatible with Agent 2 or older. Once you've upgraded, you cannot revert to 2.0 or older unless you have a backup of your pre-upgrade data. There are also some minor incompatabilities with reverting to prior 4.x and 3.x versions.

1. Run the Agent setup executable
   • If you are running Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7, you may receive a Security Warning/launch confirmation. Click on the "Run" button to accept our digital signature. NOTE: In order to launch this dialog, Windows Explorer will attempt to connect to comodoca.com, the signing authority. If Windows Explorer is blocked from accessing the Internet, you may experience a delay getting this security prompt
2. On the Verify Upgrade Directory screen, make sure the location is correct. If not, browse to the location where the previous version of Agent is installed
3. Choose whether you want to back up replaced files and click Next.
   • If you choose to back up replaced files, select a backup directory and click Next
   • NOTE: This will backup Agent system files but WILL NOT back up your Agent data files. You should have made a copy of your Agent data files before getting to this step.
4. On the Ready to Upgrade screen, verify setup summary information and click Start
5. Choose whether or not you want to launch the readme file and click Finish. We recommend that you review this file
6. Launch Agent
   • If you are running multiple instances of Agent, repeat from here for each additional instance you have.
7. On the Agent Upgrade dialog, you will be warned that your data files will be upgraded and that you will no longer be able to use these data files with the previous version. Click "Yes, upgrade now" to continue
8. When Agent finishes the upgrade process and loads, you will be prompted to launch a help topic which will guide you through what's new in Agent. Click Yes. If you choose No, or if the topic fails to load, go to Help | Getting Started.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

My Message List columns are resizing

Agent can "smart resize" the columns if you change the width of the Article List pane. This is controlled by the "Automatically adjust column widths ..." option in the Message List Pane panel of General Preferences. Please click the Help button for information about this preferences panel.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Newsfeeds.com doesn't work with Agent?

With the release of Agent 3.2, which has native multiple usenet server capabilities, this is no longer a problem. Agent 3.2 and later versions do work with Newsfeeds.com and you just need to configure as many servers as you need.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

Server Settings for Agent

The news server and it's login settings are set in the Tools | Servers And Accounts | News Servers panel, the outbound email is set in the Outbound Email Server panel, and the inbound email on the Inbound Email Server panel.

You will have to find out from your service provider(s) what information is needed in each place.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.13.07, please give us your feedback.

Using Agent with a Broadband connection

To use Agent over a direct (dial-less) connection (cable modem, DSL, LAN, etc) all you have to do is go to Tools | Options | Online Options | Dial Up Networking and remove the setting to open a dial up connection before going online. And, of course, set your server information up according to the new servers you will be accessing.

The news, pop, and smtp server names are set in Tools | Servers and Accounts.

You will have to find out from your service provider(s) what information is needed in each place.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Using Agent with AOL: eMaill2pop

You can use Agent with AOL email. Not directly, but it is possible.

You need to use a third party gateway. eMail2pop from www.eMail2pop.com is one. Here are directions to configure Forte Agent with eMail2pop.

1. Open Forte Agent.
2. From the menu, select Options | General Preferences.
3. Select the Inbound Email Server panel.
4. Enter these values:
   • Host Name: localhost
   • Login Method: Username and password
   • Username: the login name of your AOL account
   • Password: the password of your AOL account
5. Select the Outbound Email Server panel.
6. Select Send email via SMTP
7. Enter this value:
   • Host name: localhost
8. Select Login method: username and password
9. Select Use POP username and password
10. Click OK
11. Add your user information to email2pop if necessary according to its directions.

You cannot use Agent, or any other third party application, with AOL's version of newsgroups. You will need to use a third party usenet server. See www.smr-usenet.com and www.slyck.com for lists of free and commercial servers you can use.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.12.05, please give us your feedback.

Using Agent with AOL: eNetBot

You can use Agent with AOL email. Not directly, but it is possible.

You need to use a third party gateway. eNetBot from www.enetbot.com is one. Here are directions to configure Forte Agent with eNetBot.

1. Open Forte Agent.
2. From the menu, select Options | General Preferences.
3. Select the Inbound Email Server panel.
4. Enter these values:
   • Host Name: aol.enetbot.com
   • Login Method: Username and password
   • Username: the login name of your AOL account
   • Password: the password of your AOL account
5. Select the Outbound Email Server panel.
6. Select Send email via SMTP
7. Enter this value:
   • Host name: aol.enetbot.com
8. Select Login method: username and password
9. Select Use POP username and password
10. Click OK
11. Add your user information to eNetBot according to its directions.

You cannot use Agent, or any other third party application, with AOL's version of newsgroups. You will need to use a third party usenet server. See www.smr-usenet.com and www.slyck.com for lists of free and commercial servers you can use.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

What is the News Access Plan?

From the News Access Plan in the Folder Properties, you can adjust how Agent uses the servers you have configured. Even if you only have one server listed, you should know this.

The Retrieving Headers tab is the primary tab, the other two tabs are based off of the settings here. From here, you can set which servers are enabled, their relative priorities to each other by moving them up or down the list, whether to use only the first enabled server or all enabled servers in order. If you specifically want to feed folders in Agent from more than one server ("virtual servers"), then you will want to select the option to retrieve from all enabled servers.

The Retrieving Bodies tab allows you to a) override the priorities, if, for example, you wanted to get headers from one specific server and b) control whether or not Agent will try all servers in the list or only those that Agent knows carries the newsgroup in question. Like in the previous tab, you can control which servers are enabled and their priority order.

The Posting Messages tab allows you to control which server Agent will use to post messages through. If more than one server is checked, Agent will use the first enabled server in the list that carries the newsgroup. And agian, you can control which servers are enabled and their priority order.

The two options at the bottom of the panel affect all three tabs the same way, and are therefore in the tabs, but below them.

And because this is a set of folder properties, you can override the Default Properties on a per-folder basis, giving you as much control over just how and from where Agent downloads newsgroup messages as you want.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.19.09, please give us your feedback.

Why do I see question marks in my received messages?

Question marks instead of regular characters in messages means that your settings for the selected language does not include the character set being used in the message you're reading. What is happening is that the character does not exist in the character set you are using, which means that Agent cannot display it. So to show that something is there, Agent displays a question mark.

To change your language settings to include a larger selection of character sets, go to Tools | Options | Languages. Select the language in the list at the top, and make your changes in the options below. For most European languages you will want to use something that says one or more of the following: Western, Euro, UTF, Latin9.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.09.08, please give us your feedback.

Why does Agent forget all my settings each time I run it? (agent.ini is gone)

If you lost your Agent setup, then someone or something is removing files from your Agent database. Assuming you are not doing this yourself, does anyone else have access to your system and/or setup? Failing that, are you using any kind of evidence eliminator program, such as Window Washer or Privacy Guardian? Unless they are told to leave Agent alone, they will cause the problem you are seeing by deleting your Agent configuration and/or data file(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.06.07, please give us your feedback.

Why does Agent forget all my settings each time I run it? (Start In location wrong)

As explained in the section on the data directory, Agent expects to find its setting and data files in the data directory. If it can't find them, it assumes it is being run for the first time and displays the registration screen.

You normally specify this directory in the Start In field of the shortcut that starts Agent, or through Agent's command-line argument. If you don't specify this directory, or if you run Agent through some third-party shell that doesn't properly set the working directory, it may run in a different directory than it did the last time you ran it. If there are no data files in that directory, you'll get the registration screen again. (You'll also get a set of files created in that directory, as explained in the next section.)

See the topic on data directory for specific instructions on how to set this.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.12.06, please give us your feedback.

Why is Agent putting files in the wrong directory?

As explained in the data directory topic, when Agent is run it normally uses the current directory to store its data files. If you don't specify this, it may put them someplace you don't want them, like the program or current directory.

See the topic on data directory for specific instructions on how to set this.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Zone Alarm locks up Agent 2.0 after upgrading from previous version.

In Zone Alarm, Agent 2.0 may be listed, however, in its Program Control / Programs, in the Access column, 'Trust' and 'Internet' may not be checked, as they are for Eudora, IE and Messanger, but have a Question Mark instead. Checking them fixes the problem. However, they are not easy to check. One must click on the Question Mark. The choices of allow, block, and ask start flashing after a few seconds. One must wait until the flash is on, then click on allow. Agent 2.0 then runs.

This is apparently now true with both the freeware and Pro versions of Zone Alarm.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.24.04, please give us your feedback.

Do I have to re-type a failed post?

No, you do not have to re-type a failed message. Whenever you attempt to post a message, Agent saves it in the outbox. This means that if the post fails for any reason, the messageis still there and you can try to post it later. To do this, select the Online | Post messages and Emails menu option. Of course, some failures are permanent, which may require changes to the message or your settings. The actual error message you get will tell you why the posting failed.

To see the contents of the outbox, select Window | Open Outbox Window. Any message that has been rejected by the server will be there with a red/brown frowning face status icon. Post Usenet and Email Messages will cause Agent to attempt to send these again.

If you are set with the default settings for posting messages, you will also find stored copies of sucessfully sent messages, which will have yellow smiling face status icons.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I have my signature added to the end of my post?

in Agent 3.1 and older, the default signature is set in the Group | Default Properties | Posting Messages panel. In Agent 3.3 and newer, the signature is a function of the Persona, and is assigned via Tools | Options | Posting Messages | Personas.

The signature is automatically attached to all documents that you post or mail using Agent. Note that the signature will not be added to the Composition Pane contents, Agent appends the signature when the message is actually sent.

If you would like to set up different signatures for each group, in Agent 3.1 and older, you may override the default by first selecting the group whose properties you are overriding, and then select Group | Properties for Selected Groups | Posting Messages and selecting thr "Override Default Settings" option. You can then choose the signature to use when posting from that group. In Agent 3.2 and newer, you assign a different Persona to each group you want different settings for.

You can also override the default signature on an individual message by pressing the "All Fields" button and changing the signature field.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.09.06, please give us your feedback.

How does word-wrap work when I'm editing a message?

For outgoing messages, there are two parameters that control wordwrap: the Message | Word Wrap menu option, and the Line Length option on the Options | General Preferences | Posting Messages panel.

When a message is transmitted, only the Line Length parameter is used. All lines are wrapped at Line Length characters (remember, posted messages are inherently "fixed-pitch"), with one exception: Lines that begin with one of the configured quote characters are not wrapped, based on the assumption that the original text was formatted correctly (or, at least the way the author wanted) to begin with.

The display in the editing window itself is also affected by the Word Wrap option. Lines will still wrap at the Line Length setting (unless they're quoted), but if Word Wrap is set then all lines also wrap as necessary to make them fit in the window. If you don't set Word Wrap, then lines may be wider than the window and you'll have to scroll horizontally to see parts of them.

If you want to see exactly what the message will look like when it's posted, select a fixed-pitch font, make sure your window is wide enough to display Line Length characters, and turn off Word Wrap. OTOH, if you have a very narrow window and just want to see the text without worrying about the final format, turn Word Wrap on, select the font of your choice, and type away.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Typing in the text box of the composition window overwrites instead of inserting.

Press the INSert key; it's a toggle (the current state of which in the pane with the focus is shown by the presence or absence of the letters OVR on the status bar.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

Why doesn't my signature appear in the edit window?

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.

As a future enhancement, we're considering changing Agent to add the signature to the editable text in the message window. This would allow you to confirm that the signature really was there, and to edit it if necessary.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.06.02, please give us your feedback.

Dealing with email spam

As good as the filters in Agent 3 are, they are limited by the simple fact that they are rules based, and limited to the headers. To be really effective against spam, you need to be able to include the body content and use a flexible, self-correcting classification method. To this end, we added this in Agent 4. Please see the FAQ entry "How does the new Junk filtering work?" for details.

If you are using an older version of Agent, we and recommend an email proxy called POPFile, available from SourceForge.

POPFile is not a filter per se. Rather, it's a classifier. What this means to you, is that POPFile does not kill messages. Rather, it sets new header information according to its classification data, and you cam then set Agent's filters to work based on the headers that POPFile sets.

POPFile is a proxy, which means that it works in between Agent and the server. POPFile comes with basic setup instructions, but in a nutshell, to use it you configure Agent to use 'localhost' as the server and modify your POP server login userid to 'server:username' where server is the server you use and userid is your username on the server.

Agent 4 and POPFile use the same classification technology.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.05.09, please give us your feedback.

Does Agent support my webmail account?

It is not possible for Agent to natively connect to a web based mail system. You can, however, use a local proxy to interface between Agent and your webmail.

Web2Pop, from JMA Software, claims to provide this service with all of the major webmail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc). We have not tried this product with all the different webmail providers out there, so we cannot vouch for whether it will work correctly in all situations with Agent. Therefore we cannot offer technical support for this product. However, you can find out more about this product, including a search function to see if your webmail is supported from the above link.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.22.03, please give us your feedback.

How do I control where posts/emails are filed?

In Free Agent, your posts and emails are filed in the outbox. In Agent, you can setup where your outgoing posts/emails are filed on the Group | Default Properties | Posting Tab.

You can also set this up for individual groups or several groups at a time by highlighting the group(s) and selecting Group | Properties | Posting Tab. Check the 'override defaults' box and modify the settings as you desire.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 07.15.02, please give us your feedback.

How do I make sure that addresses never appear when I'm sending to a list of addresses?

When you define a Field Text value for an address book entry, Agent uses that value in your messages' To: field in place of the entry's real list of addresses. So, instead of seeing their own addresses in the message, your recipients see the Field Text instead. This feature is useful for sending messages to mailing lists, when you don't want the recipients of the list to see the email addresses of the other recipients.

However, if you use the Expand Addresses feature of the address book when selecting your mailing list entry from the address book for use in a message, Agent inserts all of the addresses from the list into the message, and does note use the Field Text.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I set Agent to automatically retrieve my email?

To have Agent automatically check for mail, go to Options | General Preferences | Inbound Email | Checking For Mail and set the option Automatically check for email every [ ] minutes and provide a value for the box. Select the appropriate suboption from the list below it.

If you're on a dialup connection, either of the first two will work for you; the first will cause Agent to check only when it's online, the second will cause Agent to dial and close the connection when it checks for mail. The third option is good if you're on an always-on connection (ie, cable, dsl, etc) and want Agent to check for mail whenver it's loaded, not only when it's actually online with the news server.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

How does the "Manage Folders" menu work?

When you select either the Copy or Move to Folder menu option the flyout menu will list up to nine folders that you have specified, followed by a menu option "All Folders...". You should put the folders that you copy or move messages to most frequently on the flyout menu so that they are easily accessible.

To configure the flyout menu, select Options | General Preferences | Navigation and Menus | Folder Menu. There are two listboxes shown on the configuration panel. The top one shows a list of all folders that aren't already displayed on the menu. The bottom one shows the folders that do appear on the menu. To add a folder to the menu, select a folder from the Folders listbox and click on Add. The folder name will appear in the Menu listbox. There are no ordering buttons, but items are added above the highlight.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.05.04, please give us your feedback.

What is the "two site mode" and how does it work?

The "two site mode" is so that you can synchronize your email from two locations. In order for this to work properly, your mail server must update the unread marks on your email. If the mail server does not update the unread marks on your mail, then your mail will remain on the server forever instead of being deleted when you download your mail from your second location. Additionally, Agent will not know to mark as read email that has already been retrieved elsewhere.

The settings for this in Agent are in Options | General Preferences | Inbound Email | Checking For Mail:

• Leave messages on server
• Until retrieved at both of my sites
• If the message has already been retrieved, mark it read.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Where are my sent messages? They're not where I want them

Agent files local copies your sent messages according to your configuration in Folder | [Default] Properties | Posting Messages | Message Filing. Default Properties affects all folders. Property Schemes overrides the defaults, and can be assigned to folders. Properties overrides both the defaults and the assigned scheme for the selected folder(s).

By default, copies of sent email messages are set to be filed using contact folder assignments.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.13.07, please give us your feedback.

Why are my posts not showing up in the outbox?

There is a setting under Group | [Default] Properties | Posting Messages called 'File replies in same folder as original message'. If you remove the checkmark from the box, Agent will file the message in the outbox. Default Properties affects email and all newsgroups. Properties overrides the defaults for the selected newsgroup(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Why can't I select the "Import Messages" menu item?

The File | Import Messages option is grayed if you have no folders configured in Agent. To configure a new folder, go to Group | New Folder and create one.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Agent crashes scrolling with a Logitech MX series mouse

We fixed this problem as of Agent 3.1.

The problem was caused by a bug in the SetPoint driver/software suite from Logitech for use with their newer mice, and is generally associated with the horizontal scrolling function. We've heard reports that at least one beta version of the Opera browser is also affected by this bug.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.31.06, please give us your feedback.

Cannot start Agent: "Cannot find agent.xrs" error

What to do about this depends on if you're using Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7

If you're using Windows XP, make sure that Agent is not running by checking the system's Task Manager and then re-run the Agent installer. If the problem persists, reboot, delete the agent.xrs file from your program directory and run the installer again.

If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, start by rebooting then uninstall Agent. Now, go to your VirtualStore folder and delete any and all files related to Agent. (See What files does Agent use? for a list.) Your VirtualStore folder is located in your system's c:\users\<yourname>\AppData\Local folder. After you delete those files, you can re-install Agent and it should now work.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

How do I recover data from a corrupted database file in Agent 2 or older?

For these instructions, we're assuming that the server does not have enough retention to re-download the messages, or it would take too long, or put you over your quota, or it's a folder.

You can use AGReco, written by an Agent user, to try to recover information from a corrupted database, or to just export all of the messages from a group or folder. Note that this only works with Agent 2 or older. If you're using Agent 3 or newer, see this FAQ entry instead.

Once you've extracted the data from the group(s) or folder(s), open Agent and unsubscribe from the group or delete the folder. Agent will ask you to confirm the action. Depending on if it's a group or a folder, you'll have to either answer "no" to keep the messages and properties or "yes" to delete. Resubscribe to the group or recreate the folder. (You can download messages if you want, but you will probably wind up with duplicate messages when we're done, so it would be better to wait until later. Not applicable when dealing with folders.) Close Agent.

If a newsgroup:

Next, using AGO, written by the same user that wrote AGReco, flip the status of the group from newsgroup to folder. Close AGO, start Agent. Use Agent's File \ Import Messages feature to import the output file from AGReco into the new "folder" you just made. Close Agent, use AGO to flip the "folder" back to a newsgroup.

If a folder:

Just import the file(s) created with AGReco.

If you had filters for the group(s) or folder(s), open up the applicable Folders Window and reassign the filters to their proper settings, or delete and recreate them.

NOTE: Read all of the documentation in both programs, including their ini files. Half of the instructions for AGO is in the ago.ini file.

Forte did not write these two applications, and cannot be responsible for their use, or any problems they might create on your system. Use at your own risk, so to speak.

These programs require the Visual Basic 4 runtime files. If you need them, you can download them here: vb4r32p.exe.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.14.06, please give us your feedback.

I get a 'Connection closed unexpectedly by server' error, what now?

The error message "Connection closed unexpectedly by server" means that the server disconnected from your winsock driver without telling your winsock driver that it was going to do so.

This is usually caused by an extremely busy server trying to free up resources to handle tasks more efficiently, the server suddenly going offline (because of a lockup, maintenance, power problem, etc.), or phone line noise (which would cause the server to think that you weren't connected anymore). There is not much you can do to address the actual problem, except for making sure you have a clean phone line and contacting your provider to see if they can help. But you can compensate for it with Agent 3 or newer.

In Tools | Options | Online Operation | Task Settings, set Agent to Retry the task, and Agent should continue to re-try the task until it sucessed or hits the timelimit you specify.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.31.06, please give us your feedback.

I get an error "This program might not have installed correctly" when installing in Windows 7 or Vista

You might get this error message if you install Agent in Windows 7 or Vista and override the default installation path. The default installation path is C:\Program Files\Agent.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

My database is huge! (or I get a "folder file full" error.) How do I fix this?

This has nothing to do with the amount of free space or memory on your system. The dat files themselves in Agent 4.2 have a size limit of 8 gigabytes each (in older versions it's 4 gigabytes). If this limit is reached, the error message "folder file xxxxxx.dat full" is displayed.

Go to Folder | Default Properties | Purging Messages | What To Purge and set Agent's purging options to something more aggressive than they are now. Agent ships with a default purging time of 30 days. 7 days is more than sufficient for most people. And unless you frequently go back and re-read or reference older posts, you should be fine with a purge time of only 2 or 3 days. You when Agent purges (when getting headers or when closing the program) in Folder | Default Properties | Purging Messages | When To Purge.

And don't forget to also make sure Agent is compacting the database files, in Folder | Default Properties | Purging Messages | When To Purge. This is what will actually free the space. You should change this, too, to something more aggressive than the default value of 20%. To maintain minimum disk usage, set this to 1%.

Purging only marks the messages for deletion. Compaction is what actually removes them from the database. You should also know that Agent needs at least as much free space on the drive as your largest data file in order to compact the database. With modern hard drives starting at 80 gigabytes, this shouldn't be a problem.

If you view binary groups, and you have Agent configured to save the binaries in the message, your .dat files can grow quite large even with very aggressive purging and compacting. You might then want to configure Agent to save when downloading and to remove the attachment from the message body by looking under Folder | Default Properties | Receiving Messages | Saving Attachments, and set it to either save all attachments or selected file types automatically and "After saving an attachment, remove it from the message". Press F1 (Help) at this point to read up on the various attachment handling options located on this tab.

If you get this error when deleting messages or moving them to the trash folder, then it's likely that it's your Trash folder that's full. Reconfigure your trash folder to keep deleted items for a shorter amount of time via Tools | Options | Trash Folder: "Do not remove messages put in the trash folder less than [ ] days ago", then manually empty the trash via the File | Empty Trash command.

Default Properties affects all folders. Property Schemes overrides the defaults, and can be assigned to folders. Properties overrides both the defaults and the assigned scheme for the selected folder(s).

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.24.09, please give us your feedback.

Only runs once when installed in Vista or Windows 7

This is probably caused by running Agent from the installer when you installed Agent. This is not your fault, the option is there. However, Microsoft is stupid. :-) It assumes that any and all actions taken from the installer is part of the installation process, which is a protected process, and will not allow those same actions to be taken from a non-administrator account later. Since Agent was initially launched from the installer, the OS is assuming that action is part of the installation process. By uninstalling Agent and re-installing without that option set, the installer finishes before you run Agent and it's therefore not seen as an installation process, but a regular process.

Here's what you need to do:

Uninstall Agent and move your database to another location. The FAQ entry "Where is my Agent database?" shows you how to locate the database.

Since this is Windows, reboot for good measure.

Re-install Agent and accept the default program location. In the last panel of the installation wizard is an option to run Agent - UNcheck that option and then click the "Finish" button.

Move your database back.

To ensure that the install runs as a new install and not an upgrade, there cannot be anything Agent related in the default locations. To fix this problem, Agent must be reinstalled as a new install. By moving your database out and back in, you will retain your current data and settings.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

Some versions of ZoneAlarm Pro can possibly lock up Agent.

Versions 4.0.123.012 and higher of ZoneAlarm Pro let you optionally configure certain events when applications ask for Internet access. The default configuration, however, can cause Agent to freeze in certain instances.

To correct this behavior, open the ZoneAlarm Pro control panel and click Program Control. Next select Agent and then click on the Options button. This will open a small window titled Program Options. The Authenticate Components option under the category, Authentication is checked by default. Change this to Authenticate program by full path name only.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Agent relays a "too many connections" error from the server

Agent's default configuration is to use up to 10 connections to the server, automatically adjusting if the server supports fewer than that. There are two possible reasons why you would be getting a "too many connections" type error with Agent. One is that some servers give an error message that Agent does not recognize indicating that it's trying to use too many connections. If this happens, you'll see the error instead of Agent automatically backing off the number of connections used.

To manually adjust for this, you can set the number of connections Agent will use in Tools | Servers And Accounts, selecting the news server in question and editing the appropriate options.

The other reason is that you may have disabled the option to automatically adjust the maximum number of connections. So the first thing to do is to make sure this option is enabled in the above mentioned panel. If it isn't please do so and try the server again.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.04.06, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by server: 441: From header not in Internet syntax

This means that you have set Agent to use an improper set of headers and your server doesn't allow that.

Go to Folder | [Default] Properties | Posting Messages, scroll the box in the center to select the From line and edit it in the lower box. "Internet syntax" for an email address includes the following formats:

"Real Name" <name@isp.com>
name@isp.com

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by server: 441: More included text than new

Many service providers impose a limit to the ratio of quoted text to new text. Agent does not impose a limitation on the amount of quoted text to new text. The error message you received was generated by the server, not by Agent, just as the text on the error message indicated.

The only way to deal with this is to either edit out more of the quoted text, or be more verbose in your reply.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by server: 441: Posted in the Future

This error means the date/time on the article, as sent by Agent, is more than 24 hours later than the current date/time on the news server. Agent gets its time and date information from Windows, so you should double-check your computer's date and time.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by server: 480: Authentication required

This is similar to the 502 error.

This error means that your news server requires you to provide authentication. You need to check with your service provider to find out exactly what is required. In most cases, you need to supply the server a user name and password. Once you get this information from your provider, you can enter it via Tools | Servers And Accounts, and selecting the server in quesiton.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.18.06, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by server: 501: Bad command usage (or syntax error)

There are two known possible causes for this.

The first one is that Agent is set to use Secure Password Authentication on a server that does not support this. To our knowledge, only MSN uses it.

The second one is that the computer's network name or description is configured to an invalid or illegal name. If this turns out to be the problem, you will need to consult with your ISP or Operating System Technical Support from Microsoft for help in changing it, if necessary.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.18.05, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by server: 502: Authentication error

This is similar to the 480 error.

Typically, one of the following three items causes you to receive a 502 error:

• You are trying to connect to the news server while you aren't connected directly to the ISP that hosts the server. Some ISPs don't allow you to connect to the server from outside their domain.
• You need to go to the Tools | Servers And Accounts | News Server panel, selecting the server in question and filling out the News Server Login section with a username and password (as if you had received the 480 error instead).
• You are specifying a username and password on the section mentioned above when you don't have to.

In all of these cases, you should contact the service provider that runs the server and double check with them if authentication is needed to access the server, and if so, what information is needed.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by server: 502: Too Many Connections.

In cases like this an authentication error occurs when more connections are opened to the server than are allowed. This results in the 502 error. If you receive this 'Too many connections' error, please close your newsreader for 5 minutes so the connections can timeout, and you should then be able to login normally again. Also, if you can reduce the number of connections that the newsreader opens to a lower number than the server allows, 4 is a good number, this should prevent the problem from occuring in the future.

In Agent 3.x, this is set at Tools | Servers and Accounts | News Servers and select the server that is having the problem. Change the number of maximum connections to 4 or less.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 03.09.06, please give us your feedback.

Error 10022 or WSAEINVAL with Agent 3.2 or newer

The most likely cause of this is that you set Agent to use SSL on a server that does not support it. Go to Tools | Servers And Accounts and set the server in question to not use a secure connection.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.18.06, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by winsock: 10048 WSAEADDRINUSE

This error message indicates that you have two servers of the same type running at the same time, and the second one is failing to load because you can only have one of each type running at one time per port.

Do you have Agent set to receive mail with SMTP? If so, do you also have an SMTP server running on your computer? If you are using Windows 2K or Windows XP Pro or Server, you have one built in and it may be enabled.

When Agent is set to receive via SMTP, it acts as a mini SMTP server for inbound connections. Either reset Agent to receive mail with POP (the preferred method, receiving mail with SMTP is depreciated) or change the port used by either Agent's SMTP server or the other SMTP server, or disable the other SMTP server if you don't need it.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by winsock: 10060 WSAETIMEDOUT

This means that a connect attempt failed because the server did not respond in time. The timeout period is dependent on which server type we're dealing with.

Check the obvious first: check that the destination address is a valid address. If you used a hostname, did it resolve to the correct address? (You'll need additional software to check this, most user software does not provide this information.) If the hostname resolution uses a local host table (ie, you're using a "web accelorator" type program), it's possible you resolved to an obsolete address (and this is the biggest reason to not use "web accellorators"). Can you ping that hostname (additional software needed again)?

Do you have a DNS configured? Check with your ISP to make sure that you are set to use the correct DNS. Try a traceroute to the destination address to check that all the routers are functioning (additional software again). Also, make sure that you are set to use the correct DNS server.

Are you using a firewall? It may be blocking Agent's use of the network. Windows XP has one built-in that may be active.

For the "additional software", if you want to check those options out yourself, you will need some kind of "network toolbox" application that can do the listed functions. Software catalogs such as www.tucows.com and www.download.com should have several listed. Or you can ask your ISP to run the tests for you.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by winsock: 10061 WSAECONNREFUSED

This means that no connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. This usually results from trying to connect to a service that is inactive on the foreign host.

Make sure that you have Agent configured to use the correct servers. The news and smtp server names are set in Tools \ Servers and Accounts.

If you're using any routers, firewalls, or virus protection software, check to make sure that Agent has permission to use the network.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.03.05, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by winsock: 10065 WSAEHOSTUNREACH

Are you using a firewall or proxy? If so, check its settings, it may be blocking Agent's connection to the server.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.10.02, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by winsock: 11001 WSAHOST_NOT_FOUND

This means that your Winsock cannot find the host you specified. Double check your Agent settings at Options | General Preferences | Server And Accounts with your ISP or service provider to make sure that you are specifying the correct servers for news and mail. Check for correct spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Also make sure that you don't have any leading or trailing spaces in the server names. Ask your ISP or service provider for the correct server names. Also check to make sure your system is using the correct DNS server and Gateway settings for your connection. You should ask your ISP for the correct settings.

If you're using any firewalls, check to make sure that Agent has permission to use the network. See the FAQ entry "After Upgrading I can't connect with Agent. I get a 'Winsock Error'"

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Error reported by winsock: 11004 WSANO_DATA

This means that the although the specified server name is valid, there is no data record of the requested type, and indicates a potential problem with the DNS server your computer is configured to use. Despite the official description of "This is not a temporary error," it probably is, and it could be that the DNS your computer is configured to use is being updated.

If you still get this error after a half hour, contact your ISP and make sure that you are using the correct DNS server.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.10.02, please give us your feedback.

Can I set one filter to apply to a subset of my groups?

No, sorry. You can't have a single filter apply to just some groups. They are either for a single group or all groups only.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Can I use wildcards at the beginning of words (e.g., *money)?

That depends. When using a word based filter, wildcards can only go at the end of the word. For more flexability, consider using a Regular Expression filter instead. You can find a complete writeup of how Agent uses Regular Expressions in the Help file: Help | Index | Regular Expressions.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I copy a filter from one group to another?

Follow these steps:

• Use the command Add Copy of Filter to make a copy of the filter you want. Change the scope of the filter to Global before saving.
• Go to the newsgroup window, and highlight the group you want the new filter to apply to.
• Open a new filter window via Window | Open Usenet Filters, and change the view to all global filters (check Global in the Select View dialog box).
• Edit the desired filter, changing the scope to the current newsgroup.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

I've ignored a thread, but a Watch filter hits on a message in the thread. What happens?

It depends on what kind of Watch filter you've defined:

• If the filter action is Watch Thread, Agent will remove the ignore tag for the entire thread and replace it with a watch tag. It will then retrieve all previously unretrieved bodies for the entire thread.
• If the filter action is Retrieve Body or Mark for later retrieval, Agent will leave the ignore tag on the thread but will still retrieve the body for the message. However, the ignore tag still on the thread will cause the message to be marked read.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

I have Agent configured to get all bodies in a group. How do I set a Kill filter to skip the bodies of some messages, but still get the headers?

Instead of using the group property to retrieve all bodies for the group, use a combination of Kill and Watch filters. For example, if you want to kill all messages containing "cash", but get bodies for all the rest, set up group-specific filters as follows:

Kill filter: Action: Mark Read Priority: 400 Filter Expression: subject: cash

Watch filter: Action: Retrieve Body Priority: 1 Filter Expression: *

You can then add any number of Kill filters with a priority greater than zero, and Agent will retrieve bodies for all the rest.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Is 'subject: $' more efficient than just '$'?

There is a small performance difference because without including the header token, Agent will apply the expression to all fields it filters on, which us currently only the Subject and From fields. In practice, because Agent only searches these two fields, the performance difference is negligable. Including it is , however, probably a more accurate representation of what you're actually trying to do.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Is 'subject: (A or B or C)' more efficient than three separate filters?

Yes, it is. However, unless you've got thousands of individual filters, the difference should be negligible.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

My filter expression is "$$$*". Why doesn't the wildcard work?

Any punctuation inside quotes, except a dollar sign, is ignored. So, any operators you want to use (*, &, |, etc.) must be outside of any quotes or they won't work. Use the following expression instead: $$$*

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Why do I need three characters in a wildcard expression?

By requiring three characters in wildcard expressions, we were able to optimize Agent's filter performance significantly.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Why doesn't the following filter expression work: $*

Wildcard expressions must have at least three characters preceding the wildcard, where characters may be letters, numbers, or dollar signs ($). Use the following expression instead: ($ or $$ or $$$*)

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Why doesn't the following filter expression work: ***

Filter expressions are word-based, where a word is any sequence of letters, numbers, and dollar signs ($). When comparing an expression to a message, Agent compares complete words only, ignoring all spaces and punctuation between words. If you want to match everything, use a single asterisk instead: *

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.27.06, please give us your feedback.

Can I try Agent before I buy it?

Yes. Agent is trialware. This means you can install it and use it with all Agent functionality for 30 days prior to purchasing the program. If you decide to buy Agent then you can enter your newly purchased registration key to register your copy of Agent. If you decide you don't want to purchase Agent, Agent will cease all online operations when the trial period expires. You will still be able to access any information already in Agent.

You can download Agent from our download page.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

How can I remove duplicate messages when importing into Agent?

There is a quick way to import and de-dupe news posts which have come into Agent.

1. Import the messages into a spare folder
2. Select all the messages and drag them to the required folder. Agent will ask whether you want to move the duplicates.
3. Select "No" at Agent's prompt.

• have no message ID
• are from the same author
• are in the same thread, or for some other reason have the same subject give or take a "Re: " at the beginning

So for email messages, try this:

1. Import the messages into an empty spare folder
2. Select all the messages and drag them to the required folder. Agent will ask whether you want to move the duplicates
3. Select "No" at Agent's prompt
4. Now use "Find Global" to search the spare folder for messages which have a message ID. The "Find Global" search expression is

   Message-ID: {.}

   • These messages can be put aside as duplicates

This FAQ Entry was updated on 12.08.06, please give us your feedback.

How do I back up my data (prior to an upgrade)?

To backup your Agent files prior to an upgrade, you need to open Windows Explorer and select the Agent directory. The default Agent directory is 'C:\Program Files\Agent'. Select the 'Agent' directory, and right click on it, then choose 'copy'. This will insure that all subdirectories are copied, including the data directory. Now change to a temporary holding directory where you will store your backup copy. Right click within this directory, and choose 'paste'. This will copy your entire Agent directory to this temporary location. If there are any issues with your upgrade, you can reverse the copy process and paste the Agent directory back into the original location to restore your copy of Agent to where it was prior to the upgrade.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I purchase Agent? What are my options?

If you have never purchased Agent before, please visit our Agent Orders page to purchase a new user license for Agent. If you have previously purchased Agent, you may be eligible to purchase an 'upgrade license' for Agent at reduced price. See our Agent Upgrade Policy to find out if you are eligible. Please visit our Agent Upgrade page to purchase an upgrade license.

Agent is fully functional trialware, which means you can try the program for 30 days free without making a purchase. If you like Agent, you can purchase a license. In Agent, select Help | Trial Status for information on your purchase options. If you do not want to buy Agent after trying it, when the 30 day trial period is over it will cease all online operations. You will still have access to any data you have on your hard drive.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.17.07, please give us your feedback.

How do I upgrade to Agent 2.0 or Free Agent 2.0?

See our Agent Install and Upgrade Instructions for a step by step process. If you have questions about which upgrades are free, see our Agent Upgrade Policy.

As always, when you upgrade you should make a backup copy of your current installation in case anything goes wrong with the upgrade. This allows you to restore the original working directory and prevent any data loss because of catastrophic problems.

To backup your Agent files prior to an upgrade, you need to open Windows Explorer and locate the Agent directory. The default Agent directory is 'C:\Program Files\Agent'. Select the 'Agent' directory, and right click on it, then choose 'copy'. This will ensure that all subdirectories are copied, including the data directory. Now change to a temporary holding directory where you will store your backup copy. Right click within this directory, and choose 'paste'. This will copy your entire Agent directory to this temporary location. If there are any issues with your upgrade, you can reverse the copy process and paste the Agent directory back into the original location to restore your copy of Agent to where it was prior to the upgrade.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 02.06.04, please give us your feedback.

What files does Agent use?

Agent uses the following list of files. Some of these files are in your Agent program directory and some are in your Agent database directory:

aabimport.xml
agent.exe
agent.exe.manifest
<8 digit hex #>. dat & .idx
agent.ini
agent.chm, agent.hlp, agent.cnt
*.cod
contact.xml
filters.dat & .idx
folders.dat
groupdir.dat
grpdat, grpidx, & ranges.bak
grpprops.dat
junk.zf, content.zf
junkfilter.xml
mailuids.dat
main???.clx & .tlx (??? = )
cust???.tlx (??? = )
mfilters.dat & .idx,
mutex.tmp
mwords.dat & .idx
personal.aab
ranges.dat
Router-Log--.xml
.ffs
sig.dat
tasklog.xml, errorlog.xml
urltype.dat 
words.dat & .idx
xpost.dat

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.15.09, please give us your feedback.

When I unsubscribe from a group, I get a dialog box I don't understand

When you unsubscribe from a group, you can no longer delete your group data by accident. You must first check the confirmation box before the "Yes, delete everything" button will activate.

If you subscribe/unsubscribe to groups frequently, you can choose to deactivate this additional step by selecting the appropriate option in the "In the future" drop box. The default is "Prompt for action", which will display the dialog box. This setting is mirrored in the Confirmations panel of the General Preferences dialog, so if you have deactivated the warning, and set it to, for example, "Delete all messages, ...", you can reset it to either "Prompt for action" or "Keep all messages ...".

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Where is my Agent database? I can't find the files

As of version 4.2, Agent will by default place its data files in the Windows default location for program data. In Windows XP, this is "C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Forte\Agent" and in Windows 7 and Vista this is "C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Forte\Agent" or "C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Forte\Agent" (NOTE: If your system was originally XP and upgraded to Vista, it's probably the XP path.)

By default, these are hidden folders in Windows, which is why you cannot find them. To get Windows to show them, go to your system Control Panel and open up Folder Options, click the View tab, and then enable the Show hidden files and folders setting. If using Vista and you are not using the "Classic View", then from the Control Panel first open up Appearance and Personalization.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

Which operating systems are and are not supported by Agent?

Agent runs on Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP,Vista and Windows 7. 64bit versions are not officially supported, but do work. (64 bit versions of Windows are not fully compatible with "regular" versions of Windows). Agent will not run on Windows 95 or NT4 if they have not been updated with the "desktop update" that was included in Internet Explorer 4.

Although not an officially supported platform, Agent and Free Agent have also been made to work on UNIX and Linux systems under Wine and Crossover Office. Please see the CodeWeaver site for info about Crossover Office. Agent may work natively in OS/2 and/or Warp, but even if it does, it is unsupported.

Likewise, there is no native support for MacOS, though Agent does work (unsupported) in the VirtualPC Windows emulator, and on the new MacIntels with Parallel Workstation, BootCamp or Crossover Office Mac. Parallel and Crossover are commercial products, BootCamp is a free install from Apple if it's not already included.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.19.09, please give us your feedback.

Why do I see "=" or "=20" signs at the end of many lines in received messages?

The message was posted in Quoted-Printable format, and you have Agent set to display the messages in raw form. In Agent 4.x go to the View menu and toggle off the Display As Raw Message selection. In previous versions of Agent (1.x and 2.0), go to the Message menu to toggle off the Show Raw selection.

If the header tags that describe this as a Quoted-Printable message have been removed for any reason, then there is nothing you can do about it except complain to whoever is using the software that incorrectly removed the tags or failed to correctly translate the message. Examples of how this can happen include, but may not be limited to:

• You are looking at a reply from someone whose client doesn't support quoted-printable
• You are looking at a message in a mail list digest where the list management software doesn't support quoted-printable (Majordomo 1.9x, for instance)

This FAQ Entry was updated on 07.01.08, please give us your feedback.

How can I extract all the data from a group or folder?

If you want to extract all the data from one or more groups or folders in Agent, AGReco makes it simple. It will extract all the data from the specified group or folder to a standard format message file that can be re-imported into Agent or read with any text editor. You cannot import messages into Free Agent.

Forte did not write this application, and cannot be responsible for it's use, or any problems it might create on your system. Use at your own risk, so to speak.

This program requires the Visual Basic 4 runtime files. If you need them, you can download them here: vb4r32p.exe.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

I'm using Free Agent, how can I do a global search of my groups?

If you are using Agent in either registered or trialware mode, there is a global search function available to you via the Edit menu. If, however, you are using the software in Free Agent mode, this feature is unavailable.

There is, however, a third party application called AGlobs that you can use to accomplish pretty much the same thing.

Forte did not write this application, and cannot be responsible for it's use, or any problems it might create on your system. Use at your own risk, so to speak.

This program requires the Visual Basic 4 runtime files. If you need them, you can download them here: vb4r32p.exe.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 10.01.02, please give us your feedback.

Program freezes when starting Agent

It sounds like something has corrupted a data file, and Agent is set to open with that group or folder. But since it's corrupted, it can't. Here's how to fix this:

Open the agent.ini file in a text editor and find the setting

ReturnToMessage=

it's probably set to a value of '1'. Change it so that it has a value of '0'. This will cause Agent to start with the first message in the first group or folder in your list and not where you last left the program. Save the change. Do not let the file word wrap, or you will destroy several of the longer settings.

Start Agent and go from folder to folder until it crashes or freezes. Note the folder. Restart Agent and select the folder imediately above the problem folder, hold the Shift key down and select the folder immediately below the problem folder to select all three. Then select File | Repair Selected Folders... and follow the prompts and instructions in the repair wizard.

Your agent.ini file is with your database.

See this FAQ entry to help you locate your database: Where is my Agent database? I can't find the files

This FAQ Entry was updated on 09.23.08, please give us your feedback.

Why are some people posting with more recent versions than I have?

If you think you're running the most recent version of Agent or Free Agent, you may sometimes be surprised to see a newsgroup posting by somebody with a higher version number than you have. What's happening here - are these people somehow special? Why do they have something that you don't have? There are several possible reasons for this.

The first is that you might have missed a release announcement and are using outdated software. Go here for Agent's Release Notes.

If you're using the latest public version, something else is obviously happening. The post may have come from someone who is beta-testing a new version that we will be releasing in the near future, or they may have a special version that fixes a specific bug they were encountering. If the posting came from Forté (somebody@forteinc.com) then they may just be using an internal development version that hasn't even made it to beta yet.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I suppress the header details when I'm reading a message?

You can show or hide the message headers via the Show All Header Fields toggle. In Agent 2.0 and older, this can be found in the Message menu, the right-click menu, and is also the <H> key. In Agent 3.0 and newer, the menu toggle is in the View menu instead, and is not in the right-click menu.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 04.18.06, please give us your feedback.

My messages aren't being marked as read.

It is possible to change the behavior that Agent uses when automatically marking a message as "read". The following options in the Options | General Preferences | Navigation and Menus | Navigation dialog control this behavior:

Automatically mark messages read:
( ) Whenever the message body is visible in the Message pane
(x) Only when the Message pane is selected
( ) Never

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Why does some word-wrapped quoted text appear in the wrong color?

When you're viewing a message that contains quoted text, you may sometimes notice that the text is word-wrapped and that the wrapped lines appear in black instead of blue (or whatever color you've chosen for quoted text). This is actually a problem with the message itself, not with Agent.

This happens when the newsreader that created the message decides to word-wrap the quoted text and does not put a ">" at the beginning of the wrapped lines. Because they don't start with the quote character, Agent has no way of knowing that they were originally part of the quote, and so it displays them in black. (To prevent you from perpetrating erroneous quotations like this, Agent doesn't wrap quoted text. See the section on word-wrapping in the editor for more information about that.)

If Agent wraps part of a quoted line, it does not provide a ">" character but still displays it in blue. It can do this because it knows that the new line is really part of the quoted line above it. See the section on word wrapping when reading for more information.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Agent updates things out of sequence

When you tell Agent (version 3 and higher) to get anything in either selected folders or all folders (in the desk or all desks), Agent will retrieve in top-down order, like it always has. The difference is that with multiple connections, as one item finishes, it moves onto the next pending item which could be several lines lower in the list. A few such apparent jumps is all it takes to make it appear that Agent is processing tasks out of order, when in fact it's not.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.19.06, please give us your feedback.

Do I need to check "Server creates messages out of order"?

Probably not. You can probably leave this option unchecked since most news servers don't add messages out of order. However, if you think you may be missing messages, enable this option first to see if that's the problem. Unchecking it will generally improve performance.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

How do I sample X number of headers, or X number of days worth of headers?

The Online | Sample Headers from Selected Groups command does this. You can choose to sample the X most recent messages or messages from the last X days. Additionally, by checking the option to update the records, Agent will use this to synch its message count to the server.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

How does Priority Retrieval work? How do I configure multiple connections in Agent 2?

When enabled, Priority Retrieval allows you to download a message now while Agent is processing other download tasks, instead of putting it at the end of the queue. The settings for this are Options | General Preferences | Online Operation | General Settings: "Enable priority retrieval" and "Enable priority attachment retrieval". These are two separate settings.

In order to make use of this, you must also queue your main download process with the Mark For Downlaod flag and Get Marked Messages. If you just select a bunch of messages and then use Get Selected Messages, you will already be using the Priority Retrieval function. Agent can use a maximum of two download streams.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 01.20.06, please give us your feedback.

What's the difference between downloading headers and bodies? Why are there separate settings?

Agent is designed around the concept of an offline reader. As part of that, to minimize how long Agent will remain online, when you get new newsgroup messages, it will retrieve the headers only. Actually, all newsgroup clients do this, we just make it obvious by doing so only on command, not whenever you load the program or enter a newsgroup.

Additionally, as part of the offline reader concept, merely selecting an article in the Message List pane does not immediately retrieve it. Agent is designed with batch operations in mind. This means that it allows you to mark for download what you are interested in, and then retrieve them all with a single command.

If you want to retrieve specific messages on demand, like other newsgroup clients do, you can do that too with any of the View commands in the Navigate menu, or double-clicking on the header.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.03.05, please give us your feedback.

What do I do about a "too many messages to retrieve" error in Agent 1.93?

This error message is displayed if the sum of the messages currently in (Free) Agent 1.93's database for the group and the total number of new messages that may be retrieved (i.e. the total number of messages in the range of new messages available from the server) is greater than 32,000 in the 16bit version or 1,000,000 in the 32bit version. Of course, the total number of messages you end up with after the retrieval may be less than this. For example, (Free) Agent may end up purging some old messages, and there may be gaps in the range of available messages. But (Free) Agent has to prepare for the worst, which entails allocating enough space to store all old and newly-retrieved messages. Here are the workarounds:

• Tell (Free) Agent to retrieve a smaller number of messages. You can do this with the Online | Sample... menu option, or by setting the Limit number of headers retrieved per session parameter on the Retrieving tab on the Group | Default Properties for All Groups dialog to a value smaller than the limit. This works well if this is the first time you have visited a group, and you are thus trying to retrieve all available messages. Once you're caught up, the number of messages retrieved in future sessions should be much smaller.
• Do a manual purge before getting new messages.

This limit was increased to 8,000,000 in Agent 2, and the way headers are processed was changed in Agent 3, which should prevent this error from occuring at all.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 08.25.06, please give us your feedback.

When I get headers, Agent now says "Retrieving list of available headers". What does this mean?

When retrieving headers, Agent 1.x would display a message that says "Retrieving up to XXX headers". However, on many news servers there are gaps in the message count. Because of this there were circumstances in which the count displayed would be inaccurate and Agent would take a long time determining which headers were really available.

Now, if you have Agent set to Always get complete list of available headers, the header download is actually a two-step process. First, Agent gets a list of headers, not the headers themselves, and displays the message "Retrieving list of available headers". Agent will then retrieve the actual headers. Because of this new behavior, the download of headers is actually faster, and provides a more accurate count.

If you disable this setting, located in Group | Default Properties | What To Purge, Agent will skip the first step most of the time. Depending on the how many and the size of gaps in the message count already retrieved, Agent may still occasionally first get the complete list.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 05.06.04, please give us your feedback.

When sampling by date, Agent appears to get all headers. Why?

If you sample by number of days, Agent does indeed get a list of all available messages, keeping only those newer than the given date.

There is a server command, NEWNEWS, that returns a list of messages newer than a given date. There are two reasons we don't use the NEWNEWS command. One is that it returns a list of message-IDs rather than the server-assigned article number. Agent would then have to request each message by message-ID, which would be very slow. So, the method we use should generally be much faster. The other is that not all servers support it.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.04.08, please give us your feedback.

Why do I get "This message is no longer available" errors?

This means that your news server no longer has the message that you just tried to download. This can easily happen if you delay retrieving the message bodies for a while. Because news servers keep messages for an unpredictable amount of time, the only safe thing to do is to get the message bodies the same day you get the headers, or see if you can find a news server with a longer retention. If you think the article was marked unavailable by mistake, or if you just want to try again, you can unset the flag via the Message | Mark Available command.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 07.09.09, please give us your feedback.

Why does it take so long to update a group after retrieving headers?

Agent allows you to sort your newsgroups by any of about 20 different methods. However in order to do required functions such as applying filters, Agent must first sort by Date Ascending, Threaded. So if you are sorting by any other critera, Agent will first sort internally by Date Ascending, Threaded and then re-sort by your selected method. Depending on your selected sort method, the size of the group and your system's overall performance abilties, this may in some situations cause the updating of groups to take several minutes after the headers have finished downloading.

The two sorting methods that will cause the longest delay in updating groups is by Subject and by Author.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.

Why is Agent Slow when retrieving headers?

We have tested and determined that this can happen if the setting Always get complete list of server's available messages is enabled in Group | Default Properties | What To Purge. Disabling this will speed up the header downloads considerably. We are looking into why this is happening.

This option is only useful if you have your purging set to When message is no longer available.

This FAQ Entry was updated on 11.08.04, please give us your feedback.