Agent 4.2 Release Notes
Upgrading to Agent 4.2If you are upgrading from Agent 4.0 or Agent 4.1, you may upgrade directly to Agent 4.2. If for some reason you want to revert to Agent 4.1 or 4.0 you may do so. However there are two issues you should be aware of:
If you are upgrading from Agent 3.x, you may upgrade directly to Agent 4.2. Agent 4.2 is backwards compatible with Agent 3.x, but if you revert to Agent 3.x, data for several features (e.g. property schemes and the address book) will not be available in Agent 3.x. Also, multipart messages downloaded in Agent 4.2 are incompatible with previous versions of Agent. If you revert to an earlier version you will need to download these headers again. If you are upgrading from Agent 2.0 or Agent 1.x, please see our Getting Started for Users Upgrading from Agent 2.0 or Agent 1.x section in the Online Help. Note that Agent 4.2 is not backwards compatible with Agent 2.0 or Agent 1.x. Please make sure you back up your data before installing Agent 4.2. If you are a new user, please see our Getting Started for New Users section in the Online Help. NZB FilesWith Agent 4.2 you can use NZB files to get message headers. This allows you to download specific Usenet content without having to retrieve and examine all headers in a newsgroup. Here are some highlights of how this works:
Agent also allows you to create NZB files by selecting messages and using the Export NZB Files command on the File menu. Here are some things this allows you to do:
See Agent's Guide to Binaries for additional information, links to third-party applications and links to other sites which explain how to post and retrieve binary information. DatabaseAgent 4.2 offers significant improvements in database capacity:
Smart AbbreviationAgent 4.2 introduces smart abbreviation, a new way to view a folder names and Usenet message subjects when space is limited. Message List PaneMany Usenet subjects are so long that you cannot view them completely in the Message List pane . Agent 4.2 introduces smart abbreviation, a way of detecting the key components of the subject and showing you the most important parts in the space allowed. As the space available for the Subject shrinks both the beginning and the end will still be displayed, with the center of the subject replaced by an ellipsis (...), but critical items like the file extension and series/section tags always displayed. The same method is used to display the subject name in the header of the Message pane. By default smart abbreviation of long subject is enabled. You can globally disable use of this feature by unchecking the Abbreviate Usenet Subjects command on the View menu. To control use of this feature on a per-folder basis use the Display Options panel on the Properties for Selected Folders dialog. On this panel (and on the Display Options panel on the Default Properties for All Folders dialog) you may also tell Agent the minimum number of characters that Agent should always use when displaying the file name portion of the subject. Note that Agent will not abbreviate subjects for text messages, i.e. messages that do not contain a file name. In that case Agent displays the name truncated on the right, as it has always done. Folders PaneAgent now also uses smart abbreviation to automatically shrink folder names that contain newsgroup names so they will fit in the Folders pane . Agent shortens the newsgroup portion of the folder name from the left. For example, for the folder/newsgroup name alt.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent, as the Folder pane narrows, the name will be shortened as follows: a.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent
a.u.offline-reader.forte-agent Note: If you do not want to abbreviate folder names here's how to disable this feature:
Address BookRouting Address RecordAgent 4.2 generalizes the use of a domain record in the address book, allowing you to create routing addresses , which are generally used only when you receive and route email messages. A routing address can be a full address or a domain address, and at any time you can convert a routing address to be a contact record in your address book (and vice-versa). To do this, open the routing address record (e.g. by double-clicking the record in your address book or by selecting a message from this address and using the View Sender in Address Book command on the address book Action menu. Agent allows you to filter routing addresses in your address book and Pick Address list, so you can keep these lists from getting cluttered with addresses that you don't normally think of as contacts. In addition, when you compose an email message routing addresses do not appear in the drop-down list for the To, Cc or Bcc fields. Since you are unlikely to send an email to a routing address, this keeps the list of recipients to your message to a manageable size. However you can display these addresses in the Pick Address dialog so that you have access to them. Views and DisplayThe address book now has a view option that allows you to see the contact records of interest to you. Agent provides these built-in views:
You can also create custom address book views. In the name column in the address book window Agent displays the full name, if it is defined. However there are cases where it may not be defined. If so, Agent displays the Organization field, if it exists, and if all else fails then Agent displays the email address. Agent now clears the search expression when you close the address book. Merging Address Book ContactsAgent allows you to merge contact records into a single record. New Copy of Contact CommandYou can now create contact records in the address book based on existing contact records. Select a record and use the New Copy command on the address book Action menu. InstallationAgent 4.2 uses a new installation program. Here's what's new:
Windows VistaAgent 4.2 follows the guidelines laid out for Windows Vista. Here is a screenshot. Here are the details: Location of Agent's Data FolderThe Program Files directory in Windows is considered write-only by Vista and can only be updated by sanctioned installation programs. This means that Agent may no longer store its Data directory there. Here's what this means:
Defining Agent as the default program for email, news and NZB files.Previous versions of Agent referred to the "Default web client for email", which is how Internet Explorer described default programs on its Internet Options dialog. But Windows XP introduced the concept of a "default email program"; which appears at the top of the Windows Start Menu and is the program that handles mailto: URLs. This has been carried forward into Windows Vista. Accordingly, we have made the following changes:
Other FeaturesThe junk folder now behaves like the trash folder when closing Agent and when you manually empty the trash. Set options on the Trash and Junk Folders panel on the Options dialog. As part of this, we updated the context menus for the Trash folder and the Junk folder. Agent supports ad hoc addresses. When an email arrives from a contact which has been sent to an ad hoc address you will see the Choose Address for Reply dialog, where you can specify how Agent should respond to this email. You can use the Ad Hoc Address Advanced Settings dialog to define precise formats for ad hoc addresses. We increased the speed with which Agent retrieves email messages. We also increased the speed with which the Review Recent Email window is displayed. We added checks to ensure the integrity of the file agent.ini . Most of this work is internal to Agent and you won't see anything different. However you will see that a backup file, agentini.bak, is created each time agent.ini is updated. Problems FixedWe improved the speed with which the Review Recent Email window opens. Users with a large number of email messages should notice a significant speed improvement when opening this window. We also added an Explain button to this dialog, which opens the Filter and Routing Explanation Dialog, which explains how Agent routed the selected message. In some cases (e.g. when a message-ID was missing) the explanation for how an email was routed would be incorrect. Text larger than the default size (8 points) would not fit correctly in the status bar. When trying to create an attachment or temporary folder without the proper permissions, Agent would display the following message: "Agent could not create the temporary folder .\nnCheck that the name is valid." For the % Junk detection was not working for inbound mailing lists. In the composition window , pressing F8 (Check Addresses) removed the context specification from an email address, so that when the message was sent Agent would report that the address was ambiguous. In some cases Agent was not properly quoting the To: field when using the replacement text for an outbound distribution list. When picking a folder for a contact in the address book, if you entered a non-existent folder then told Agent you didn't want to create this folder, Agent did not return to the contact form, but rather forced you to cancel out of the Pick Folder dialog. Agent would give a cryptic error message if you attempted to start Agent from the command line and used an invalid command line switch. We fixed a typo on the When to Mark Read panel in the Default Properties for All Folders dialog. The background color in some HTML messages was not correct, with the side effect that it was possible that some text could not be seen. This was due to the fact that Agent was not recognizing the bgcolor attribute in the tag.Related to the above, the background color was being applied to message headers in addition to the actual message itself. Large fonts were not correctly displayed in the RBI Folder Training wizard. If the sections of a multipart contained references to other messages, Agent did not properly encode the references if you split the multipart into the individual messages. This caused the sections to fail to thread correctly. We fixed a memory leak that occurred when viewing certain HTML messages. In some cases when you pasted values into the property grid of an address book contact the value would not be refreshed, so you couldn't see the update. We fixed a bug where ignored messages without bodies were always purged when doing a manual purge or when purging on exit, despite purge settings. In particular, Agent was purging ignored subthreads. We improved the way Agent handles multiple entries in agent.ini . When reading the file, if the same parameter appears multiple times, Agent will always use the last value in the file. This is how Agent has always worked. When writing the file, if the file contains multiple copies of a parameter, then Agent replaces the first copy of the parameter with the value of the last copy, or with the new value if Agent has changed it since reading the file. This has the effect of removing duplicate copies of parameters. We fixed a problem that prevented Agent from running on certain older versions of Windows 95/98. The system would report that symbol ShGetSpecialFolderPathA was not defined and would refuse to run Agent. Learn MoreGo here for All Release Notes. |