Forté Agent was an
email
Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...
and
Usenet
Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
news client
A newsreader is a software
application that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new ...
used on the
Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
operating system. Agent was conceived, designed and developed by Mark Sidell and the team at Forté Internet Software in 1994 to address the need for an online/offline newsreader which capitalized on the emerging Windows
GUI 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 supports
POP email but not
IMAP
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by .
IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...
.
Agent's Usenet features include access to multiple
news servers, import/export of
NZB files, threaded discussions and a highly configurable user interface
which has been criticized as difficult to use.
It has long supported
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 encoding method. yEnc's overhead is often (if ea ...
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.
In the past, a free version was offered alongside the commercial one. The free version lacked some features of the commercial version or, later, had them disabled until a registration key was entered. The last free version was 3.3.
Forté Internet Software
Originally called Forte Advanced Management Systems, Forté Internet Software, produced in the 1980s and 1990s enterprise-level products including network optimization and station administration tools that were licensed by
Nortel Networks
Nortel Networks Corporation (Nortel), formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It was founded in Montreal, Quebec in 1895 ...
. In 1996, Forté created Adante, software for managing high volumes of inbound corporate email.
In late 1997, Forté was acquired by Genesys Telecommunications (which was then purchased by
Alcatel
Alcatel SA was a French industrial conglomerate active between 1963 and 2006. It has roots to ''Compagnie Générale d’Electricité'' (CGE), a conglomerate founded in 1898 as an early state owned cable and telephone equipment company that lat ...
) to integrate Adante into the Genesys and Alcatel product lines. In 2000, Alcatel sold Forte's Consumer Software Group to Charles Dazler Knuff. Now known as Forté Internet Software, this group continues to develop Agent and to research the areas of social software, email and wireless communications using trust networks.
In 2003, Forté created Forté Internet Services, which offers Agent Premium Newsgroups (APN), a high-speed, high-retention Usenet news service.
Agent Usenet Service
/ref>
See also
*List of Usenet newsreaders
Usenet is a worldwide, distributed discussion system that uses the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). Programs called newsreaders are used to read and post messages (called ''articles'' or ''posts'', and collectively termed ''news'') to one or ...
*Comparison of Usenet newsreaders
This is a comparison of Usenet newsreaders.
Name field background color legend:
See also
* ''alt.*'' hierarchy
* List of newsgroups
* List of Usenet newsreaders
* News server
* Newsreader (Usenet)
* Network News Transfer Protocol
* Use ...
References
External links
Forté Internet Software
alt.usenet.offline-reader.forte-agent
Agent newsgroup
{{DEFAULTSORT:Forte Agent
Usenet clients
Windows email clients
1994 software