On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:19:02 -0800, Tim Douglass
wrote:

After you learn how to use Forte Agent or Free Agent, it's so simple. You can
reconfigures it to your liking. I have since upgrade to Version2. I believe
Forte Agent are Beta testing an upgrade to multi servers capability.

My initial $29 investment and another $15 late last year have gave me so much
pleasure in many ngs. Never regret it.

Agent and Free Agent will download them all, but the catch-up command
is the way to go in either case, you really don't need to download all
the old headers - and certainly not all the old articles, which I
think is what MS wants to do. One benefit to Agent is that all you
download is the headers, then you select which articles to retrieve.
By the time my filters are done I only have to see about 2/3 of the
headers in the group. Another 10% or so get hit with ignores and
disappear forever from my sight. Of the rest some are being watched,
so I have set it to retrieve those articles automatically, others I
just skim down the list and see if there is anything I want to read.
If so a quick double click gets the article - if it is an interesting
thread I mark it for watching and download the rest of the current
posts in that thread. If not, I just leave it alone and when I hit the
end of the group I mark all messages read. Next time I do the same. It
is amazing to see how quickly you can trim 300+ new messages down to
the 30 or so you want to read.

Tim Douglass