I was retrieving articles in less than a minute. When I used Agent over a dial-up SLIP connection to Syracuse University's NNTP server, it saved time by selectively downloading messages. To speed up message retrieval, it stores the headers in databases it downloads when you open a group. There is an option of viewing all headers or for only gathering 50 headers. I was impressed by the option that updated my local machine with new groups and purged groups that were no longer available from the news server.
Agent offers flexible file retrieval.
You can save text files quickly by using the right mouse click menu. You can post or retrieve image and sound files using multiple types of encoding, such as MIME and uuencode. Agent automatically launched my Windows appli- cations that were associated with extensions. The noncommercial version, FreeAgent 1.0, has all of the features of the commercial counterpart except full integrated e-mail, multilingual spell checking and technical support. Josh Linder is a network consultant at Syracuse University.