• Setting up your email and news accounts

• Setting automatic email retrieval

• Subscribing to newsgroups

Setting up email and news accounts

Setting up your news an email accounts in Forte Agent is done straight after you have installed and registered it.

1. Once registered, the Agent setup dialog box appears:

   view sample screen shot
   

   One nice thing about Agent is that is you have been using another program up until now for your news and email you can select the "Use information from another program" button and it will automatically retrieve that information for you. If, on the other hand, you are using a news/mail program for the first time, you will need to fill in the boxed provided.

   The news (NNTP) server box is where you put the address of the news server you wish to use, in this case for blueyonder it will be either:

   news.blueyonder.co.uk or news-lhr.blueyonder.co.uk or news-text.blueyonder.co.uk INFO ON LOGGIN IN ETC NEEDED HERE!!!!

   In the mail (SMTP) server you have to put the name of the outgoing server your Internet Service Provider uses, in the case of blueyonder this will be smtp.blueyonder.co.uk

   Your email address will probably be the one that blueyonder supplied you with when you signed up and will look something like abcd12345@blueyonder.co.uk, unless you have managed to set up aliases for your account (see aliases FAQ).

   The full name space is optional and is included in you email address (appears in the from: line for people who have received your email). If you preferred you could use a nickname or a name friends refer to you by instead of your full name.

   That is now the first step in the process of setting your email up. Press the 'OK' button when you have filled in all the relevant details. See setting up automatic email retrieval on how to do the next steps.

2. As soon as you have completed the above step, a dialog box appears asking you whether or not you want to go online and retrieve the full list of newsgroups. Select the 'Yes' option. Agent will then get the list of newsgroups from your news server, which may take a few minutes.

3. Select "Options" from the menu and click "Inbound email" to open a new folder dialog box:

   view sample screen shot
   

4. In order for Agent to receive email, you must first set up a new folder for the email to go into. You can call this folder anything you like, not just "inbox" as specified in the picture.  Once you have called it something and pressed 'OK' the email dialog box will appear:

   view sample screen shot
   

5. You need to fill in the POP server information, which for blueyonder is pop3.blueyonder.co.uk (for another Internet Service provider, you will have to check what this POP address should be).  You will also need your username, which is the first part of your email address and looks something like abcd12345, and your password (most likely the one given to you by blueyonder).  Don't forget to tick the "remember password between sessions" option so you don't have to put it in every time you want to receive mail.

   Select the "receive email with SMTP" as well.

   Once all the relevant details are set up, press the 'OK' button.

6. You need to repeat steps 3 to 5 for each email address you want to use.

Setting automatic email retrieval

You can either check for mail manually by selecting "Online" on the menu and clicking "Check for Email", or you can have Agent automatically check your email for you.

1. Select "Options form the menu and scroll down to "Inbound Mail" then select "Checking Mail". Check the first option "Automatically check for mail every...", then enter how often you want Agent to check for mail. When this box is checked, Agent will automatically check for mail each time you start Agent, then will check at the specified interval after that.

Subscribing to newsgroups

The Agent screen is set up in three panes, one for a list of news groups (left top), one for email messages (right top) and one for the message text/body and headers (bottom).

view sample screen shot

The one we are dealing with at the moment is the top left, the newsgroups pane.

1. The first thing you will want to do is search the list of newsgroups available to you and find the ones that interest you. You can either scroll the groups and select the ones you want at random, or you can use the "Find" function that comes with Agent (found in the "Edit" menu), which allows you to type a key part of the news group name and search for it through the list.

2. Once you have found a group your are interested in, right-click it with your mouse. This then gives you a menu with several choices in it:

   view sample screen shot
   

   Sample Message Headers : Retrieve the specified number of most recent headers in a group. This is a nice option if you are not sure what the group is really like and only want to view a view messages before subscribing.

   Get all message headers : Retrieve all of the headers currently available for a group. This can number in the thousands in some groups.

   Subscribe to group : Add this group to the subscription list.

   (To subscribe to the news group if you selected to sample a view headers first, simply select "Group" from the menu and click on subscribe).

3. You can do this for each news group you want to subscribe to.

Last Amended : 2002-08-31 by elfin
Original Author : Nicola