The Release Notes contain a detailed description of the new features and bug fixes in Agent 99d. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Agent to Agent 99d, you will notice several things that have changed from previous versions. In particular, PLEASE NOTE that we have changed the behavior of some of Agent's navigation features, based on feedback from many Agent users.
In previous versions of Agent, messages were automatically marked read whenever the message body was displayed in the body pane. Many of our users complained that they accidentally marked messages read while scrolling through the list pane. We have added a Preference setting that allows you to choose when Agent should automatically mark articles read (described in the Release Notes). **In particular, we have changed the default behavior so that Agent now only marks an article as read when it is displayed in the body pane AND the body pane has the focus. If you prefer the old behavior, you can change this setting under Options | Preferences | Navigation.**
We have also changed the keyboard accelators that were used to Save/Launch Binary Attachments (described in the Release Notes). We know that this is confusing for our power-keyboard-users, but when we added the new "Skip To/View Next Unread Article with Body" feature, we decided that B and Ctrl-B were the obvious choices for keyboard accelerators. The Save Binary function has been renamed Decode Binary. Its new accelerator is Ctrl-D (it used to be Ctrl-B). The accelerator for Launch Binary (it used to be Ctrl-Shift-B) is now Ctrl-L.
Agent now contains an Address Book. Select Window->Open Address Book to view it. You can add items to the Address Book by selecting New from the Address menu or using the toolbar buttons while the Address Book is open. You can also add addresses by selecting a usenet or email message and choosing Message->Add Author to Address Book. See the online help for a complete description of the Address Book feature.
[Online] RasUseAny=1
You can now copy or move items from the Outbox to a folder.
You can now select a folder in which to automatically route your outbound messages.
Implemented an interim solution to binary decoding. Agent now lets you apply all of the attachment decoding options to email messages in folders. But, it never deletes the body of an email message. This means that it doesn't store the destination filename in the message after you have extracted the file, nor does it display the little camera icon next to the message. The next release will have the fully integrated solution, with MIME support.
The email filter now recognizes the "Apparently-To:" field. If a received or imported email message contains an Apparently-To field rather than a To field, Agent treats the field as if it were the To field.
Added a Table of Contents to the AGENT.INI help topic.
Agent now generates its own message IDs when posting messages. This was done so that sent messages, when copied from the outbox to a folder, will thread correctly with replies to the sent messages. You can disable this feature (if Agent's message IDs disagree with your news server) with the following INI option:
[Message] GenerateId=0
You can now cancel a sent Usenet message that has been placed in a folder if you allow Agent to generate message ids (the new default). This will allow you to cancel a message without first retrieving it from the news server. If Agent does not generate the message id for the message, you must retrieve it from the news server before you can cancel it.
Added a Cancel button to the "Skip to Next Unread Group" message box.
After spell-checking a selected area of text, Agent no longer asks you if you want to start at the beginning of the message and spell check the entire message.
You can now selectively specify the header fields to use when printing.
Added .INI-file options to control the behavior of the progress indicator bar.
Agent now accepts email messages of the form @x:foo@bar (they're called "source routing addresses"), either with or without the enclosing <...@gt;, and will pass the @x routing info to the mail server. The full syntax of the routing (@x:) portion of the address is:
@<domain> [,@<domain>]*:
(This means that the routing info consists of one or more @<domain> components, separated by commas, with the whole thing followed by a colon).
Agent now accepts email addresses without the "@domain" part. Addresses with just the @ are also acceptable. Agent does not try to determine the actual domain for the address. Rather, it sends the address as is to the mail server, and lets it deal with it. Most mail servers automatically assume the server's local domain if no domain is supplied.
Enhanced the behavior when replying to a Usenet message which has the "Reply-To:" field set to "poster". Agent now pops up a dialog which gives you the choice of (1) replying to the poster via email, (2) posting a Usenet message AND CCing the poster via email, or (3) just posting a Usenet message.
Agent now supports the "In-Reply-To:" field (which identifies the specific message to which the reply pertains).
The build number now includes a "32" or "16" to indicate whether you are using the 32-bit or 16-bit version of Agent.
Under Preferences | Posting, Agent was limiting the length of the "Reply to Email" and "Forwarded Email" introduction strings to the number of characters that fit on the screen. This limit has been removed.
Agent now recognizes "UTC" when parsing the date/times of messages.
Agent now displays a warning message if you attempt to use "Save As" on a header with no body text.
When renaming a folder, the "new name" field automatically defaults to the old name to make it easier to edit.
Added end-of-message marker in the message body pane.
Agent now allows you to select text in read-only windows (i.e., in the message body pane) with the keyboard. Previously, you could only use the mouse to select text. To select text with the keyboard, turn off Scroll Lock on your keyboard.
Agent no longer spell-checks words that look like email addresses, domain names, URLs, etc. Normally, this means that Agent will not try to spellcheck the introduction line, unless an email address contains a proper name.
Various bug-fixes and enhancements in the composition window, including:
Fixed a GPF that could occur if you entered a very long field value in the "Value for:" edit control on the composition window.
Agent now remembers an article's original newsgroup. This allows Agent to use the correct Group Properties, Introduction Strings, etc. when you reply to a message from a folder. For messages created outside the context of a group (original email messages and usenet messages created when no group is selected), Agent sets the field to blank, which will cause it to use the default group properties for the message.
Added the Post | New Copy of Message command. This will allow you to resend a message that has been copied to a folder.
When opening any of the tabbed dialogs (e.g., Preferences, Properties for Selected Group), Agent now automatically selects the tab you were viewing the last time you had the dialog open.
Added the "Newsgroups:" header field on CCed copies of Usenet posts (so that when you get a copy of the email you get an indication in the header fields of what group it was associated with).
Fixed a problem that could cause a menu to be dismissed when the New Email Notification message was displayed.
Fixed a problem in the composition window that could cause text to be garbled or disappear after pasting text that came from a UNIX machine (UNIX machines use a single \n character as a line terminator instead of \r\n pairs).
Fixed a problem that could prevent you from copying or moving a message into a folder because Agent would think you had already copied/moved it. Agent now does a better job of checking for duplicates, and also lets you override the warning and copy the messages anyway.
Fixed a problem that prevented Agent from accepting some less common formats for email addresses.
Fixed a problem in which Agent was stopping all online tasks even if you answered "No" to the "Stop all online tasks?" prompt.
Fixed a problem that caused the current thread to collapse when new email was received.
Fixed a problem that caused a "435 Duplicate" error when posting multi-part Usenet messages.
Fixed a problem that could cause Agent to retrieve two copies of an email message if you had "Leave on server" enabled.
Fixed a problem in which the 'Newsgroup:' header field was not being initialized correctly when displaying messages in a folder.
The X-Attachment field is now visible when displaying all header fields for an email message. This field contains the name of any attached file.
Fixed some problems in controlling the scroll lock light. Now Agent maintains its internal state and its own scroll indicator, but does not enable/disable the keyboard scroll lock light.
Bullet-proofed against date/time calculation errors.
Fixed a GPF that occurred when trying to repaint an empty Body pane (after an operation such as resizing, scrolling, pressing a key, clicking in empty window).
Fixed a GPF that could occur if you defined a folder before you got groups for the first time and then got new groups or refreshed the group list.
Fixed a problem that prevented a right-mouse click from changing the window focus. This occurred when you had two Newsgroup windows open and switched between them by clicking with the right-mouse button.
Fixed a problem that could lead to an "out of memory" error when deleting messages. This generally occurred if you pressed Delete in an empty message list.
Fixed a GPF that could occur if you received an email with no header fields.
Fixed a GPF that could occur when you dragged and dropped a message with a long subject field.
Fixed two problems that could cause Agent to "unlock" articles when upgrading to Agent 99a or 99b from early version of Free Agent.
Fixed a problem in the French spell-checker. It didn't deal with words that contained apostrophes.
Fixed a problem that could prevent Agent from retrieving all parts of an email message. Apparently, some listservers send multiple messages with the same message id. Agent would see the "duplicate" ID, and assume that it had already retrieved the message.
Fixed a GPF that could occur if Agent checked for email while purging.
Fixed a problem in which active retrieval tasks could be disrupted if you changed the sort in a group that had any messages queued for retrieval. This resulted in Agent not retrieving all marked message bodies.
Fixed a problem that could result in "error 550: User Unknown" when sending an email message. This occurred if you had your field defaults set to always CC: yourself, and then you overrode that for an individual email by blanking the CC: field in the outgoing post.
Fixed a problem that was allowing email recipients to see who was BCCed on the email. Agent now omits the Bcc field from the message when it is sent.
Fixed a problem that caused an Ignored thread to be marked "unread" if it was moved to a folder.
Fixed a problem that could cause Agent to hang or GPF if it read a message header that contained a References field with contained the message's own message id. (We found another newsreader that incorrectly generated messages with this problem.)
Fixed a problem which could make new text wrap incorrectly in the composition with if you included one of your quote characters (i.e. >) in the newly typed text.
Fixed a problem that was causing Agent to access the hard drive every second or so. This problem only occurred if you were not running a disk cache program, such as SmartDrive.
Fixed a problem where Agent couldn't find the "Inbox" folder if the folder name started with a blank.
Fixed an error that could cause "503 need RCPT posting email" error message.
Fixed a problem that could cause the body pane to reset to the top when you received new email or pressed a key that changed the state of the article (i.e. Keep, Ignore).
Fixed problem in spell-checker that could cause it to jump over a misspelled word (after deleting a previous word).
The menus have been changed to follow the new Microsoft guidelines for using menu elipses.
Agent was sometimes using the wrong icon for incoming email messages, marking them as Usenet messages. This has been fixed.
Fixed a problem that could cause Agent to hang reading an email with a long "To:" list.
This is an unusual bug-fix upissue, in that nobody who is currently using Agent needs to download it. It fixes several bugs that occurred when you updated to Agent from pre-1.0 versions of Free Agent, which means that anybody who has build 112 (the .99b release) doesn't need it because they've already done the conversion. There are no new features or other bug fixes in this upissue - we put it on the site only to prevent future upgraders from having the conversion problems. (People with pre-112 versions should get it for the 112 bug fixes, of course.)
This is a bug-fix upissue and fixes the following problems:
Two bugs that occurred only if you were using SMTP to receive email:
If you change the sort for a group, but Agent hasn't actually re-sorted the group (it was part of a multiple selection), and you perform a skip to next unread that jumps into that group, Agent jumps to the first unread message in the old sort and then re-sorts. The result is that you end up in a random location in the message list.
The Watch and Ignore flags were not propagating correctly if you selected Watch or Ignore while the Message list was sorted by anything other than Thread.
If you were moving a list of messages from one folder to another and cancelled the operation partway through, some of the messages could be lost.
GPF at 0009:43F9 when Agent timed out trying to access the server and you had it configured to retry after a connection failure and to unload the Winsock driver between attempts.
GPF at 0014:F9C7 on startup if the data and/or shared directories specified in AGENT.INI no longer exist.
Compatibility problem with some POP servers that produced an "Error reported by server: -ERR bad number 0" when trying to check email. This would occur if you told Agent to leave your mail on the server AND your server does not support UIDL.
This is the first email release, with most of the "basic email" features implemented.
Due to email's tight integration, we've made a minor yet pervasive change to our terminology, replacing the word "Article" with "Message."
User-defined folders have been added. Folders appear in the Group pane (which is now called the Groups/Folder pane) along with newsgroups.
You can now sort messages in a group or folder by author, date, size, or in the normal thread order.
You can now receive email from POP3 and SMTP servers.
Added additional Introduction Strings strings for replying from an email.
Added a progress indicator when downloading message headers, bodies, and binary attachments.
Added support for "poster" in the follow-up field.
Modified the right mouse button behavior to work like Windows 95, which also allows you to select items from the context menus with either the right or left buttons. To revert to the old behavior, edit the following line in AGENT.INI:
[Browser] RightButtonSelects=0
Added protection against automatically launching executable binary attachments. This is controlled by the Confirmations tab of the Preferences dialog box.
You can now choose which fields appear at the top of message bodies.
Added Ctrl+H as a keyboard accelerator to toggle "Show All Header Fields."
Added the "Organization" field to the list of fields you can set in email messages.
Fixed bug which could cause Agent to hang on some servers when it tried to retrieve an article that was no longer available.
This is the first release of Agent. If you are upgrading from Free Agent version 0.55, the items listed below all apply.
Improved the Purging option to give you more control over which articles are purged. Also, you can now purge groups manually, and automatically on program exit.
Added an option to compact the databases. To compact your databases, choose Compact Databases from the File menu.
Significantly improved download, threading, and purging performance. Now, purging most groups should only take a few seconds at most.
You can now send an email carbon copy (CC) when you post an article. This is especially useful when you want to post a follow-up response and email the original author at the same time.
Moved some commands from the File menu to a new Options menu and the Window menu. Commands that control program configuration are now on the Options menu. Commands that open new windows are now on the Window menu.
Agent now allows you to edit all header fields (Distribution, Keywords, etc.) for messages you send.
You can now mark an article unread while you are viewing its body.
Selecting Watch Thread on an unread article now skips to the next unread article. You can disable this option with the Navigation tab of the Preferences dialog box.
You can now control whether or not Agent should validate email addresses in your messages.
You can now cancel a post after you send it. To cancel a post, highlight the article in the Article pane and choose Cancel Article from the Article menu.
Agent now accepts a command line parameter to specify the location of AGENT.INI. The optional argument can be either the directory containing AGENT.INI or the name of the INI file to use as AGENT.INI.
Added support for Spry's winsock dialer. This fixes problems using Agent with Internet in a Box and CompuServe. You no longer have to manually start the Spry dialer prior to having Agent go online.
Agent is now less strict when searching for the articles composing a binary attachment. It ignores case and leading/trailing whitespace when comparing the article subjects.
Added "Delete Body" to the Article menu. Select this option to delete the selected article's body but not its header.
Add drag-select support to highlight multiple groups or articles with the mouse. Just click and drag the mouse over the groups or articles.
Agent now starts a new thread when a follow-up article has a different subject than the original. You can control this behavior with the Navigation tab on the Preferences dialog box.
Agent's dialog boxes now have the correct 3D look when running in Windows 95.
After unsubscribing to a group or leaving a group you just sampled, Agent now asks if you want to keep the group's articles. If you say "No," it will immediately delete articles in the group. This feature helps you delete unwanted database files from your disk.
Agent now includes all newsgroups from the original article when you post a follow-up to a cross-posted article. This option is controlled by an AGENT.INI parameter:
[Message] CurrentGroupOnly=0
Added a confirmation message when you mark all the articles in group as read or unread. You can turn this message off from the Confirmations tab of the Preferences dialog box.
Agent can now retry refused connections that can occur when the news server is very busy. For details, see the Online Operation tab of the Preferences dialog box.
Added context menus to the Composition and Outbox windows. Context menus are activated by clicking the right mouse button.
Add a preference option for selecting which mouse button selects items from the context menu. See the Navigation tab of the Preferences dialog box for details.
Skipping to the next unread article from the Group pane now moves the focus to the Article pane for the next group with an unread article and selects that article. You can disable this behavior by unchecking the "Skipping to next unread article jumps..." box on the Navigation tab of the Preferences dialog box.
Agent now adds a leading zero when posting multi-part attachments. E.g., [04/15].
When an article does not contain a timezone, Agent now assumes local time. It used to assume GMT. This feature is controllable via an AGENT.INI parameter:
[TimeZone] AssumeLocal=1
Choosing Get Selected Article Bodies when a collapsed thread is selected now retrieves the bodies of all the articles in the thread.
You can now specify a location for your database files (*.IDX and *.DAT). To keep your database files in a directory other than Agent’s normal working directory, edit the Home parameter in the [Directories] section of AGENT.INI.
Ctrl+A now works in the Outbox window.
Added an option to AGENT.INI to override the Port numbers used for the NNTP and SMTP servers. See the online help for AGENT.INI for details.
Agent now deletes the Outbox files when all the messages in the outbox are deleted.
Agent now strips EOF characters from signatures when posting.
The various debugging parameters are now documented in the AGENT.INI help topic.
Agent now purges all but the most recent article in an ignored thread.
Agent now detects when the news server renumbered the articles in a group. When this occurs. Agent adjusts the high article numbers accordingly and retrieves all new articles.
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