Today is the March, 22th 2002 - and here are some tips for the
new Forte Agent release
These are my very personal tips and NOT an official statement
from Forte!
Whenever Agent finds a yEncoded attachment with problems, then it displays a "warning dialog box". It is not the purpose to annoy the users with this box, but to help them to identify corrupt messages quickly.
Unfortunately there are some yEnc-tools which create malformatted yEncoded messages. It is necessary to remove such malfunction tools from the Usenet. So please ask the user who did post with such a tool HONESTLY to give up on it - and get a better one.
If you are warned that a yEncoded message is corrupt then you should NEVER repost it to Usenet.
Sometimes it happens that Subject lines are formatted in a way that Agent (and sometimes other newsreaders) cannot combine (join) them automatically. You can change the AGENT.INI file (with a text-editor) by setting the key: RequireFilenameWithTag to zero. Here is how it looks like:
[Attachment]
RequireFilenameWithTag=0
Forte did implement yEnc in the best way imaginable:
Agent is splitting large messages also for yEnc - and is using
a very conservative approach for the segment size:
If you define a "Maximum characters per message" of
500.000 then NO message will ever be larger. But the AVERAGE size
of the message will be just 260.000 bytes! On yEnc a message has
also an overhead - which is typically 2-4%. But it can grow for
very extreme cases (only especially created wierd examples) up to
100% overhead. So Forte uses a conservative approach to prevent
you from sending messages which might be rejected by your
news-server because they are too large. But in reality the
overhead does not have this size. It is really just 2-4% for
JPEG, GIF, AVI, MP3, MPEG, ....
If you want to send out messages with 260.000 bytes then you
should define "Maximum chars per message" with 500.000.
It will work properly in 99.999% of all cases. (The risk that
your line breaks is far higher ;-)
Agent offers a feature to update an old - already installed version. This permits easily to use yEnc. However EVERYBODY should know that it is always a good idea to make a backup of your old installation before you upgrade. NOBODY can guarantee that the upgrade works smoothly - especially if you do upgrade from very old version (0.99c :-)
I want to thank all people at Forte and all beta testers of them for their great work and their support for yEnc.
Short delays in releasing software are normal everywhere - but keeping the users "up to date" all the time - and doing a beta test seriously is NOT. Forte did an excellent job - and I hope - no, I KNOW - that the Agent users will highly appreciate their efforts and the quality of this fine newsreader!
Jürgen Helbing - 22. March. 2002 - Email: yenc@infostar.de