WatchFTP Version Information

4.5.1 (July 20, 2024)

• Fix: Several DNS issues are fixed which were introduced in the 4.5.0 release.
• A work-around against the (SSH/SFTP) Terrapin attack is implemented. This is done by disabling several encryption algorithms used by Terrapin.

This is a Free Upgrade for everyone who has a "version 4" license. Basically everyone who bought after May 1, 2016.

4.5 (February 4, 2024)

• New: WatchFTP is now compatible with the latest secure login methods (like TLS 1.3).
• Improved: WatchFTP will reuse its FTP connections longer, less disconnect/connects.
• Fix: Rare cases of the WatchFTP control center crashing at startup are fixed.
• Fix: The email address you enter as the sender was ignored.

This is a Free Upgrade for everyone who has a "version 4" license. Basically everyone who bought after May 1, 2016.

4.2 (June 13, 2019)

• Fixed: Connecting with new versions of GlobalScape SFTP servers failed.
• New: You can now export private keys.
• New: You can now set the "From" email address for your email actions.

This is a Free Upgrade for everyone who has a "version 4" license. Basically everyone who bought after May 1, 2016.

4.1.0 (January 7, 2018)

• Fixed: Connecting with new versions of WS_FTP SFTP servers failed.
• Improved: When you use Keep Session Log for debugging issues, those logs could get very large. Logs older than a few days are now zipped (and deleted after 7 days).
• Improved: On the Advanced Settings you can now set a timeout for WatchFTP to connect, previously WatchFTP would always abort after 20 seconds.
• Fixed: WatchFTP would ignore all files/directories with names starting with a ".". By default WatchFTP will still ignore those but you can now tell WatchFTP to process those files on Advanced Settings.
• New: Create local directories early. Older WatchFTP releases created local (Windows) directories as soon as they were detected on your FTP server. Version 4 only creates those directories when needed (for a file to download). You can now set an option to restore the old behavior.

This is a Free Upgrade for everyone who has a "version 4" license. Basically everyone who bought after May 1, 2016.

4.0.3 (May 31, 2017)

• Fixed: When using multiple download threads (especially on SFTP downloads), downloads could get very slow.
• Fixed: When using multiple download threads AND the email action there was a chance the filenames inside those emails could get mixed up.

4.0.2 (May 26, 2017)

• An issue was fixed that caused connection faillures.

4.0.1 (May 7, 2017)
See what's new in this major release.
Check if this Upgrade to WatchFTP v4 is free for you.

• Private Key Support
• Dynamic Naming
• Multithreaded Downloads
• Task Groups
• ...and a lot more...

3.8.0 (January 6, 2017)

• A new option to "Force Host IP Address", used when connecting Passively on Secure connections.

3.7.9 (February 16, 2016)

• WatchFTP sometimes used a wrong encoding when using accented characters for your password.

3.7.8 (November 26, 2015)

• When you backup a task with an accented name, the WatchFTP Control Center would crash upon import.

3.7.7 (October 18, 2015)

• Improved: When "Keep FTP Session Log" and/or WxRemote's "Last Message" support is enabled, WatchFTP was using a lot of CPU causing the task to run very slow. This has been fixed and tasks run a lot faster now.

3.7.6 (August 2, 2015)

• When you enter a wrong date or time format for the Email Action, the task crashed.
• Tasks could hang upon computer shutdown, causing Windows to abort the task, causing corrupted task settings and history.

3.7.5 (May 18, 2015)

• The option to remove empty FTP directories did not work for some FTP servers.
• Better support for OpenVMS FTP servers.
• When a download fails halfway, WatchFTP will reconnect and try to resume the download.
• When you have a task that deletes FTP files after several hours and the file is downloaded a second time (because it has changed), the delete will be delayed again.

3.7.4 (January 30, 2015)

• In some cases WatchFTP did not use the MLSD command to list FTP directories. This has been fixed.

3.7.3 (October 12, 2014)

• The email action did not always close the connection to the SMTP server. Some SMTP servers do not reuse open connections causing them to run out of connections.

3.7.2 (August 15, 2014)

• In some cases, after downloading very large files, some FTP servers do not send a final "success" reply. WatchFTP interpreted this as a failure to download and restarted the download. This release will first reconnect and check if the file was properly downloaded.

3.7.1 (July 3, 2014)

• Bugfix: Previous releases could crash if you used "Filter Directories".

3.7.0 (June 13, 2014)

• At startup, WatchFTP will automatically try to repair a corrupt directory list. Previous versions crashed when those files were corrupt.

3.6.6 (April 4, 2014)

• The email action did not always properly replace variables.
• The email action now uses sensible defaults for the time and date format.

3.6.5 (February 16, 2014)

• New: When you use the new v1.9 release of WxRemote, WatchFTP can send its latest messages (activity) to WxRemote.
• New: SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 proxy support when connecting to an SFTP server.
• Fixed: When you do not download detected files, WatchFTP will now properly set environment variables for your email and bat script actions.
• Fixed: Previous versions did not support downloading to the root of an UNC path (\\server\share).

3.5.2 (January 19, 2014)

• Improved: In rare cases WatchFTP downloaded files that were not changed. This typically happened when the target directory is not a local drive but on the network and there was a little network disruption.

3.5.1 (January 11, 2014)

• It is now possible to detect changes on your FTP sites without downloading detected files
• When you remove or change a downloaded file, WatchFTP will not download the FTP file again
• This release supports OpenVMS FTP servers
• The WatchFTP Control Center can optionally be password protected

3.4 (January 28, 2013)

• The "filter directories" window now supports wildcards (* and ?)
• The "filter directories" window now also has an option to tell which directories to download. Previous versions only allowed you to tell which directories should NOT be downloaded.
• You can now Copy a task (Right-click the task, select Copy).
• The File menu has a new option to Create Backup of the selected task(s).
• The File menu has a new option to Restore task(s) from a backup.

3.3.2 (December 6, 2012)

• Improved: Better support for extremely long directory and file names. Previous versions were limited to approximately 255 characters in those names, this release allows far longer (~32000 characters) names.
• New: Added support for HTTP proxy when connecting through SFTP.

3.3 (October 28, 2012)

• Fixed: All previous WatchFTP v3 versions did not properly set the timestamps of downloaded files. Besides not looking "nice", this can cause problems when Daylight Saving Time ends, causing files to be downloaded again.
• New: You can now also Run a Batch file after multiple downloads are complete.
• Improved: Better compatibility with some FTP servers.

3.2 (September 25, 2012)

• Improved: When monitoring SFTP sites the speed has been improved. Previously, for each detected file, 2 redundant calls were made to the server. Those have been removed.
• New: The WatchFTP Control Center now shows what each task is doing (task status) next to the download counts. This status can be "Sleeping", "Scanning", "Downloading" or "Stopped".

3.1 (September 1, 2012)

• New: 64-bit version of WatchFTP is available for download.
  Important: If you are currently running the 32-bit version, read the 64-bit upgrade instructions first!!
• New: You can adjust the timestamps of downloaded files (if your FTP server is in another timezone).
• Fixed: In some cases WatchFTP tried to download files with an illegal Windows filename.
• Fixed: In some cases WatchFTP did not remove empty FTP directories when the task was configured to remove those directories.
• Version 3.1 is a FREE upgrade for all version 2.x customers. Your old license key will not work, lookup your new license key here.

3.0 (August 13, 2012)

• New: SFTP is now supported.
• Version 3 is a FREE upgrade for all version 2.x customers. Your old license key will not work, lookup your new license key here.
• If you are/were running the v3 beta version, make sure to read this.

2.4 (May 7, 2011)

• New: You can now also CC and BCC emails.
• New: You can now also send HTML emails.
• New: You can delay the delete of the FTP file (delete X hours after downloading).
• Fix: The History window behaves better when refreshing.

2.3.5 (November 18, 2010)

• New: When files are blacklisted previous releases ignored those files for 1 hour. This release allows you to set this duration of this blacklist period.
• New: WatchFTP can ignore files of zero size.
• New: French translation / download / support available.
• bugfix: The window where you enter directories to ignore only allowed a few (~5) entries.

2.2.6 (February 14, 2010)

• Tasks have a new window where you can set all kind of timing related things.
• Files bigger than 4GB would not download properly.
• You can now let WatchFTP rename the FTP file after it has been downloaded. For example, let WatchFTP add a ".downloaded" suffix to the filename. At the same time you can tell WatchFTP never to download files with these suffixes.
• 4 new Proxy methods, including SOCKS4 and SOCKS5.
• When WatchFTP has trouble downloading certain files (for example because they have an illegal filename), those files are automatically added to a "blacklist" and will not be downloaded again.
• The WF_FILE_E variable (Email and Batch file action) contained garbage when the file has no extension.
• A memory corruption is fixed, depending on your exact settings this may have caused your WF tasks to crash.

2.1.9.28 (May 23, 2009)

• A few small cosmetic changes
• Prevent false positive by McAfee

2.1.9.22 (May 17, 2009)

• A few more problems with accented characters were fixed
• In certain cases files were not removed from the FTP server
• The "History Viewer" allows you to show the full timestamps of messages

2.1.6.0 (April 2, 2009)

• Fixed: Filenames with accented characters were not processed properly.

2.1.5.0 (March 22, 2009)

• New: A new column in the WatchFTP Control Center showing you the number of files downloaded and the number of files waiting to download.
  These counts are for the last 24 hours.
• New: The context menu of tasks (right-click the task to see it) now shows the downloaded filenames. When you click a filename, it will start Windows Explorer with that file pre-selected.
• Fixed: Better detection of corrupt downloads - the downloaded file will be deleted and redownloaded.

This release is a free upgrade for all customers. Just install this new version "on top" of your current install.

2.0.0.2 (January 4, 2009)

• New: a history-viewer is included. Right-click your task and select "History" to see all messages and downloaded files.
• New: WatchFTP will not immediately download files, but will wait until the file hasn't changed for 30 seconds on the FTP server.

This major release is a free upgrade for all customers. Just install this new version "on top" of your current install.

1.0.9.2 (November 16, 2008)

• If you configured a task to run as a Windows Service, the userid & password were not always properly set.
• When a task starts it will first do a check upon the configured "local directory" to see if it is accessible.
• When configuring/starting a Windows Service task, you should get better feedback in case of errors.
• When configuring/starting a Windows Service task, the annoying "dos box" is eliminated.

1.0.8.5 (November 7, 2008)

• New: Proxy support.
• New: Right-click a stopped task and let it "Run Once & Exit".
• New: Let WatchFTP remove FTP directories after all files are downloaded.
• Bugfix: The "Run a Batch File" action failed when the path to the Batch file had spaces in it.

1.0.7.1 (October 20, 2008)

• WatchFTP is now available in Spanish.
• The SMTP settings window can now send a Test email.
• When sending email fails, the error that occurred will be written to the task directory. Previously only the email was saved as an EML file.
• When a task has sent an email, it will also look for previously failed emails and retry them.
• Emails now have a proper X-Mailer header set.
• The Browse-for-FTP-directory window, started by the FTP settings window, did not use the originally entered FTP directory as initial directory.
• The helpfiles were changed to make them better compatible with Internet Explorer 6.

1.0.6.0 (August 11, 2008) This release contains the following fixes:

• If an incorrect FTP directory was entered, the task mistakenly used the root directory of your FTP server.
• The option "delete file after download" did not work properly for files containing accented characters.

1.0.5.0 (August 4, 2008)
The previous 1.0.4 version was build with a corrupt library causing wfrun to abort after the first connection.

1.0.4.0 (July 31, 2008)
This release fixes a small issue for the batch file action. The variable WF_CUREVT was not always a unique number, causing problems if you used it to build a unique filename.

1.0.3.0 (June 26, 2008)
Several small improvements:

• On Vista and Windows 2008, the settings pages will now show an "Elevation Required" shield when you change Windows Service settings of a task
• Pressing "Stop" will prompt with an "Are you sure" message
• A new option to "Pause" a task
• The tasks now have a "right-click" menu with common options

1.0.2.0 (June 18, 2008)
On some operating systems (noticed on XP and 2003), your task (configured as a Windows Service) would stop when a user logged off.

1.0.1.0 (June 17, 2008)
Fixed an issue where a deleted task is not deleted from the Windows Services applet.