Epson tech support and wawrranty

On Sat, 15 Jul 2017 21:04:36 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Char Jackson
writes:
On Sat, 15 Jul 2017 08:05:39 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:
[]
Which version actually supported concurrent connections to multiple NNTP
servers? I remember long ago trialing a free version of Agent and found
it only supported one server. To get around this, I had to copy a
config file that specified the server. Each copy would specify the
server that I wanted to use during an Agent session. I used a batch
file to select which config file to overwrite the default config file
and then load Agent. I had to exit Agent and rerun the batch file to
select a different NNTP server. What a pain.

It's water under the bridge now, but you didn't have to do all of that.
You simply create your various config (.ini) files, each pointing to its
own server, then create a series of desktop shortcuts that tell Agent to
use the proper .ini file. No batch files, no overwriting, no pain. It's
still a hack, but it's completely painless.
[]
As you say, water under the bridge now, but (once the batch or .ini
files have been created), I can't see much difference between the two
methods - you still have to close Agent in order to open it again with a
different server.


But not with modern versions of Agent, which support multiple servers.
I'm using 6.0 now, but 5 supported multiple servers too. I think 4
also did, but I don't have a clear memory of 4, and I might be wrong.

Char Jackson wrote:

It's water under the bridge now, but you didn't have to do all of that.
You simply create your various config (.ini) files, each pointing to its
own server, then create a series of desktop shortcuts that tell Agent to
use the proper .ini file. No batch files, no overwriting, no pain. It's
still a hack, but it's completely painless.

Perhaps back then Agent was capable of handling command-line arguments
but nobody mentioned that back then. That's why I came up with my own
scheme of overwriting the config file with a copy modified for the
server that I wanted to use. I had one shortcut that ran a batch file
where I could interactively select which server to use. Or I could've
used multiple shortcuts and select which one for the server to use.
Pretty similar schemes.

Later Agent added support
for multiple concurrent server access during an Agent session but I
don't remember which version added that.

Same here. I use v2.0, so it was after that. Possibly 4.0?

I thought multiple concurrent server access showed up in a free version.
That's why I was thinking maybe 3.3 would have that option.

I also remember asking in the Forte newsgroup on how to define rules.
Turned out for the old version that I was trialing that rules could not
be saved. The closest I could do was to define searches that would
effectively perform the filtering; however, I had to run the searches to
manually instigate the "filtering". What a pain.

I believe that was a limitation of the free version, along with no MIME
support, or was it no support for multipart messages. Hey, they had to
hold a few things back or no one would have bought it.

Had no need to reconstruct multiple posts into a binary as I didn't
bother with binary newsgroups. There are some that are okay but the
vast majority had blue content.

That made me
immediately look for something more robust.

That made me immediately buy it, since I wanted those features.

I was looking for something free. I trialed many free newsreaders.
Dialog actually got declined in several trials because it did not have
some of the features in Agent or even in OE; however, after I decided to
spend more time with it on defining custom scripts along with better
learning of regex and the ability to apply them to all headers made go
with that NNTP client. It was a close call. If Dialog had not be
customizable and since the others kept falling short, yeah, I probably
would've bought Agent.


Even OE was better --

UGH! We disagree there.

My opinions ware in regards to the free version of Agent that had only
one server access per Agent session and no rules. OE had those
features. However, I did use OE-QuoteFix until SP-3 for Windows XP that
gave me the registry hacks to bottom-post and where to position the
sigblock. OE-QuoteFix had some other nice features but none critical
for my use of the client. Then the author demanded that I disabled
security in OE, like NOT retrieving linked images in a message (which
could be web beacons), because his program couldn't handle the changed
renderer. I suspect that I was also skewed to something with a more
modern GUI than Agent's ancient blocky style that looked like I was back
using Windows 3.

From online image searches, this is the GUI for Forte Agent 1.93:
http://images.six.betanews.com/scree...12115881-1.gif

This is the GUI for Forte Agent 3.3:
https://pxhst.co/avaxhome/2006-06-30/screenshot.jpg

They look identical so there wouldn't be much of a learning curve to
move to the latest free version.

I agree, they look identical, and neither looks like my 2.0, which makes
me think that the picture of 1.93 is actually another picture of 3.3.
Versions 1.93 and 2.0 don't have "Desks". That was added later.

Maybe the guy that put together http://jeos.it/img/photos/index.php?p=13
got the wrong image to store there for 1.93. Unfortunately some of his
other pics and those of others showing 1.93 are hosted at a long-lived
malware domain, like at (link has been modified to add spaces so it is
not clickable):

http:// users. telenet. be/ sb/ agentnld/ images/ agent10.png

A PNG file is probably safe from malware infected.

Ken Blake wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

As you say, water under the bridge now, but (once the batch or .ini
files have been created), I can't see much difference between the
two methods - you still have to close Agent in order to open it
again with a different server.

But not with modern versions of Agent, which support multiple
servers.

Which became payware-only. No freeware version after 3.3. Forte took
overly long to add multi-server support considering the plethora of
clients (well, back then) that had it for some time.