Program: Agent
Publisher: Forte Inc.
Category: Usenet News Reader
My Shareware/Freeware Pick of the Week is the Usenet newreader "Agent," from Forté. Agent is a trialware / freeware program for reading Usenet news.
Agent is licensed as "Trialware". In other words, you can download Agent and try it out free of charge for 30 days. After 30 days, the "Trialware" will expire and the program will revert into Free Agent, the reduced function, "freeware" version. When you purchase Agent ($29), you will receive a registration key that can update either Free Agent or Agent Trialware to Agent.
As I drafted this section, the current version was v2.0.652, with version 3.0 is in the late beta stage (it had been in public beta since December 2004, so it must be coming out of beta status soon!). Version 3.0 was released at the end of last week! Version 3 is be free to all licensed owners of Agent v2, $19.00 for registered users of version 1, and $29 otherwise.
I used FreeAgent for a couple years before switching to the paid version several years ago, when it was still version 1.something. Version 2 was a big improvement over version 1. Version 3 has some big changes and improvements in capabilities that I will be checking out.
In addition to being able to read and post news, Agent will also send and receive email. As a practice, though, the use is really for sending — for forwarding a messaage to someone. The email functions are very limited. Agent focuses on news.
Check out Agent for your newsreading pleasure. If you haven’t tried Usenet news, give it a try. When you are looking for an answer to something, be sure to search the postings via http://groups.google.com — those postings do not show up in the regular Google search results.
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