eMule my oldest and goldest P2P file sharing program

Everyone has heard of file sharing and p2p (peer to peer) but not everyone understands exactly what it is. There are lots of programs out there that let you access this huge resource to download anything from research material, documents, images, music, programs and the list goes on. I will often use the web to search for that elusive something but will invariably end up using eMule to sniff around the P2P network to find it.

Shareaza is excellent for hunting down old TV episodes, music tracks or even things like old word documents. I've sometimes found some really random documents that have ended up being incredibly useful on a whole range of weird and wonderful topics.

I've previously used:

• Napster - the original. Back in the day this was my first experience of p2p. Back when MP3 was new and exciting and before we realised just how naughty downloading music really was.
• Limewire - I used to love this but then found that it was highlighting so many downloads which werent what I was looking for but were viruses masking themselves, Limewire had to die.
• Shareaza - I absolutely love this opensource download client. It handles P2P and also acts as a download manager for your existing web files and bit-torrents. A great program which comes a very close second (imho) to emule.
• eMule Mophxt - My last p2p client. Morphxt is a modified version of the standard emule client. It has lots of little tweaks that enhance the searching and downloading experience.

eMule is one of the biggest and most reliable peer-to-peer file sharing clients around the world. Many developers contribute to the project, so the network gets more and more efficient with every new version. If you have Windows Vista, it is recommended that you always use the latest eMule release (eMule 0.48a).

Where can I get an updated server list for eMule?

Go to 'Update server.met from URL' and write the following web address:http://www.gruk.org/server.met.gz Afterwards, simply click the 'Update' button.

How can I use eMule to download files?

Firstly, connect to a server by clicking the 'Connect’ button in eMule main menu. Afterwards, go to the ‘Search' screen and search for what you want to download from eMule. From the results list, all you have to do is double click on whatever you want to download and eMule will download it.

Privacy

Keep your IPfilter Updated!!! --> http://bluetack.co.uk/config/nipfilter.dat.gz

Editors Update 2010: This is an old article dating back to 2007 - which is centuries in InfoTech terms. eMule has gone off the boil in recent years and uTorrent is now our client of choice.