This page descrbies how to set up and use Forte Free Agent to read and post Usenet News through your Newsville account.

There are two basic things you need to do before accessing the Usenet through our service. The first is to setup Free Agent to receive news from us by, basically, specifying who the news server is. The second is to download the complete listing of the newsgroups we offer access to and then to subscribe to the ones that interest you.

1. Setting the news server (NNTP) to be: news.newsville.com

Start Free Agent. The window appears as shown below.

Go to the menu on the top and :

• Select "Options" and then,
• "General Preferences"

The following window will appear. This is where you can specify all the settings for Free Agent. You first go to the section User.

In the field "Server requires authorization login", put a check so that the options below will become available.

• Type your username as you submitted it in your application for your news account.

Make sure it is exactly that way, as it is case sensitive, i.e., "Joe" is different from "joe".

• Put a check on : "Remember password between sessions" and then
• Type your password as you submitted it.

After you are finished with that section, click on the button: "System"

• In News Server type: news.newsville.com

And you are finished with the first part of the instructions.

2.  Downloading the complete listing of newsgroups in Free Agent

Go to the menu on the top and select

• Online, and then
• Refresh Groups List

You will get a window that is asking you what to do with extinct groups.

• Select "delete all extinct groups"

After that, you will receive the listing of over 20,000 newsgroups that we carry.

This may take a few minutes depending on your modem's speed. When it is finished the whole list will appear in the top left window of Free Agent.

Select a few groups that interest you and then go to

• Group and select
• Subscribe, and then back to:
• Group, and select
• Show only subscribed groups

This results in a better managed listing of newsgroups to appear in the top left window. You may select one of these subscribed groups and by double clicking it you will see all the articles that it has in the top right window. By further selecting or double-clicking one of the articles, the actual message will appear on the bottom wide window.

After you have followed the steps above, your Free Agent window will look like above.

Please note that Free Agent doesn't have a built-in viewer for pictures attached to articles. If you would like to view the pictures you should first download them and then use some other JPG, GIF, etc., viewer to view them. There is a variety of very good image viewers available for free at:

http://www.tucows.com, under the category "Image Viewers"

To download pictures attached to articles:

• Select the article and highlight it.
• While it is highlighted and while the mouse is still pointing at it,
• Click the right mouse button and a new menu will pop down,
• Select: "Decode binary attachments"

This will download the attached picture into a directory that you have specified in Free Agent's "Group-Preferences", under the setting "Attachments directory" In Free Agent the images are referred to as: "binary attachments".

Most of the necessary options and actions in reading, decoding, sorting or viewing articles are available through Free Agent's powerful "right-click" menu. This is a different menu from the main one at the top, and becomes available by first selecting the article or group in question, and then by clicking the right mouse button. This will enable you to perform most of the common tasks fast and efficiently.

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