Forté Agent is an email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 and Usenet

Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 news client

News client

A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet . Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol , to download articles and post new articles...

 used on the Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 operating system. Agent was conceived, designed and developed by Mark Sidell and the team at Forté Internet Software

Forté Internet Software

Originally Forte Advanced Management Systems, Forté Internet Software makes Agent, a Windows-based Usenet news and email client. In the 1980s and 1990s Forté also produced enterprise-level products including network optimization and station administration tools that were licensed by Nortel Networks...

 in 1994 to address the need for an online/offline newsreader which capitalized on the emerging Windows GUI

Gui

Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

 framework. By 1995 Agent had expanded to become a full-featured email client and remains a widely-used application for integrating news and email communication on Windows.

Agent's Usenet features include access to multiple news servers

News server operation

Among the operators and users of commercial Usenet news servers, common concerns are the continually increasing storage and network capacity requirements and their effects. Completion , retention and overall system performance are the topics of frequent discussion...

, import/export of NZB files, threaded discussions and a highly configurable user interface. It has long supported yEnc

YEnc

yEnc is a binary-to-text encoding scheme for transferring binary files in messages on Usenet or via e-mail. It reduces the overhead over previous US-ASCII-based encoding methods by using an 8-bit Extended ASCII encoding method...

as well as many other coding schemes, and has the capability of joining incomplete binary attachments, which is useful in the event of posting errors.

External links

• Forté Internet Software
• [news:alt.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent alt.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent] the Agent newsgroup