Using Forté’s Agent?Wanna get rid of some useless headers
appearing in all your mail and postings?Hey, it's as easy as making a cup of tea,
and will take you less than 5 minutes!
If you're like me, you can't stand the fact that
X-Mailer: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451
MIME-Version: 1.0
appear in the headers of every email you send
and you're fed up with these useless commercials
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451
showing up in all your newsgroup-postings.
Why should everyone know what software you've been using? To hell with that: As sure as I am known as Jules Sans Scrupules and this is all legal yet a little on the edge, I'll describe you the easy way out for the headers mentioned:
(other remaining headers can be removed as well, but let's start with these for now. Maybe more in the future...)Here's the deal:If you no longer want those headers being sent with your mail and postings, all you need is a Hex-editor. This may sound as if this is scary high-tech-software, when you hear that word Hex, but this is just a myth. This type of editor can change a file's content without changing its size. Hex-editors are easy to get, they're on every stupid shareware CD-rom out there, or you can get a real good one (Hex Workshop) from The BreakPoint Software homepage at this URLOK you nerd, I have the Hex-editor, now what?Well, I take it you have a hex-editor installed by now?
Close Agent if you had it running. Open the file called "Agent.exe" in your Hex-editor. (this file is in the directory you installed Agent in). Now move to the off-set-positions in the file, as shown in the left of these pictures. You can easily get there by searching on any string from what you see in the right collumn.
Let's do it! Remove the X-Mailer/X-Newsreader-string:Just change this part of the file called Agent.exe
into
where you can jam the spacebar when in the right edit field (they appear as "20" in the hex-fields, see the images) in the place of those characters exactly as shown in the pics here. So: REPLACE, don't add or insert!
Of course, these can be zeros (hex 00) instead of 20's too; They have the exact same effect, but using 20 is much safer. Also: Overwriting just the %s %s with spaces in versions after 99f will lead to the same results.
Now let's remove that damn Mime-version header:When is it ever version 1.1 anyway right?
Just change this part of the file called Agent.exe
into
Now just save your new Agent.exe and there you go: gone with the wind!
Of course keep a backup of the original exe somewhere in case something goes wrong.
Bad side-effects or counter-indications:
For the X-mailer/newsreader-string: NONE!
(except maybe Forté wanting to shoot you in an alley if they knew)
As for the MIME-version header, hey, some attachments you mail out could be interpreted wrongly, but that is only due to bad and sloppy software at the receiving end. Not your fault now is it? So, it's safe to do all this. Hell it even lowers the load worldwide on news- and mail-servers ! and before you know it, if every Agent-user will do this, hey, who knows, it might speed up traffic by a few seconds! Harhar!Of course the people at Forté won't really like me for doing this, so a disclaimer can be found here. And guess what? Bottom line: I won't be responsable for any damage I or you may cause through the info given to you in this page. I'm not forcing you to do as I say, it's your problem if you fail. However, mailing me about it is fine by me.
All very nice and all, but I have another version you dork!I've tested this on several earlier versions of Forté Agent / Free Agent, and sometimes the positions, the offsets for the overwritten strings weren't as shown in the above pictures, but the strings were the same, so in that case try look for anything similar to the ASCII you see in the pictures and just try it out. For the X-reader/mailer-string search for the second occurance of ForteAgent$ and space out the ForteAgent$.%s %s/*.* where *.* is the release-number(s).
Julius, Amsterdam and hey, you can thank: Briggitte Bako
for recommending me to do this page, while I was
too lazy and didn't think for a minute there would be so much
interest in this silly header-removal-bit but there seems to be. |
