eDonkey and Overnet on the Mac

http://www.edonkey2000.com/ and http://www.overnet.com/

eDonkey and Overnet can be discussed in the same section. While they are different networks, they were created by the same programming team.

eDonkey was created first... and offered some significant improvements over the 1st and 2nd generation P2P clients discussed in the history. For one, eDonkey provided the ability to download one file simultaneously from multiple sources.

A special advantage of eDonkey, however, is that users start sharing a file as soon as they start receiving it. This means, if you are 200megs into a 400meg download, the 1st 200megs will already be made available to other users (from you) to begin their downloads. This means everyone that downloads also uploads. The end result is faster propogation of files and faster speeds on more popular files. This makes this network very popular for large files.

Overnet was meant to replace eDonkey, and contains several improvements over the older network -- but both networks are still going strong.

Advantages: handles large files well

eDonkey and Overnet Clients

mlDonkey

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/mldonkey/

MLDonkey remains the best option for Mac OS X users to access the eDonkey and Overnet networks.

While official clients exist at eDonkey2000.com and Overnet.com, they tend to underperform compared to this client (under Mac OS X).

Another advantage of mldonkey is that it supports multiple P2P networks beyond eDonkey and Overnet. Support also includes: Bittorrent, Gnutella, Gnutella2, Fasttrack, Soulseek, Direct-Connect, and OpenNap.

The biggest problem with MLDonkey is one of user-friendliness. It requires the user to invoke the command line to even launch the program and then requires the use a Web interface, rather than a windowed interface.

As a result, several graphical clients have emerged and add a graphical layer to the mldonkey client.

mlMac (recommended)

http://www.abyssoft.com/software/mlmac/

mlMac is one of the most popular graphical clients for mlDonkey, and provides users with access to all the networks available.

iSwipe (DonationWare)

http://www.hillmanminx.net/iswipe/

iSwipe is a multi-network client and the most recent version provides support for OpenNap, Gnutella, FastTrack, eDonkey and many others.

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