Announcement from Andrew Rawnsley, 22nd October, 2015.
We are pleased to announce the release of NetFetch v4 this weekend at the London Show.
For those unfamiliar, NetFetch provides a central “front end” for internet activities on RISC OS, and fetches/sends mail and news over standard and SSL connections. It supports mail fetching via POP/aPOP and POP3s, sending via SMTP, auth-SMTP and some SSL-based SMTP, and NNTP news send/receive. NetFetch also provides various extra tools including FTP and telnet etc.
The idea is that NetFetch is the program you load in your boot sequence, and regularly fetches/sends your email. You can then read it in Messenger Pro (or Pluto, if you must!) and browse via your choice of browser.
It has been six years (at least!) since the release of NetFetch 3.50, so we felt it was time for a new version. There have, obviously, been many free updates since 3.50, but the time has come for a chargeable one again.
The biggest prompt for this was the “Zero Page Protection” changes introduced by RISC OS Open over the summer, which have required quite costly updates to many applications. We’ve issued free updates for quite a few programs, but NetFetch required a number of components to be updated, so was a bigger project.
Whilst doing these updates, we decided to add extra functionality to NetFetch/Hermes, hence NetFetch 4 was born.
First and foremost, NetFetch 4 is designed to provide a properly supported system for use on modern RISC OS computers, including RISC OS 5 systems powered by RISC OS Open’s latest OSs. NetFetch 4 supports computers from RISC OS 3.50 upwards (with “new” Boot), although 4.02 is recommended for old RiscPCs.
NetFetch 4 itself contains many fixes and enhancements, including improved SSL/TLS mail fetching, improvements to RSS feed fetching and more warnings of problems.
On top of that, there’s new functionality such as decoding of UTF8 / Unicode encoded message headers. There’s improved spam filtering and “view mail on server” capability. Spooling of downloaded email is now much smoother, with multi-tasking background spool for a more responsive experience. Much effort has gone into improving robustness and reliability, and a new “quit” manager has been introduced with the background spooling to manage how Hermes (the mail fetcher) runs.
On top of this, the CD version of NetFetch 4 has been designed to provide new RISC OS users with a complete Internet Suite. A special NetFetch edition of Messenger is included which is a fully functional, but slightly older (new-machine-safe, though) version of Messenger, still very powerful. There are also a selection of browsers included too, so that you have a full suite of apps.
Please note that due to last minute testing, we may not have every function enabled in the show release, but any necessary updates will follow as free upgrades. The show edition will have all the key elements, but we anticipate that there will be future updates too.
All CD copies can be activated on !Store at no extra charge for download versions and updates too, for ease of access on media-less computers like Pi etc.
NetFetch 4 costs £30.00 as previously. Updates from v3.5 cost £15.00, also mirroring previous pricing. Older versions may cost more.
