WinGate is Integrated Gateway Management Software for Microsoft Windows, providing web caching, firewall and NAT services, along with a number of integrated proxy servers and also email services (SMTP, POP3 and IMAP servers).
WinGate 1.0 was first released on 5 October 1995, and was a re-write of a product that had been previously released in prototype form by Adrien de Croy under the name SocketSet earlier that year.
WinGate proved very popular, and by the mid to late 1990s, WinGate was almost ubiquitous in homes and small businesses that needed to share a single Internet connection between multiple networked computers. The introduction of Internet Connection Sharing in Windows 98 however, combined with increasing availability of cheap NAT-enabled routers, forced WinGate to evolve to provide more than just internet connection sharing features. Today, focus for WinGate is primarily access control, email server, caching, reporting, bandwidth management and content filtering.
WinGate comes in three versions, Standard, Professional and Enterprise. The Enterprise edition also provides an easily configured virtual private network system, which is also available separately as WinGate VPN. Licensing is based on the number of concurrently connected users, and a range of license sizes are available. Multiple licenses can also be aggregated.
The current version of WinGate is version 7.2.6.3449 (released 2 August 2012).
Read more about WinGate: Free Version, Platforms, Features, Other Features, Early History, Notoriety, Sobig Worm and WinGate 5, WinGate 7 - The Next Generation, Version History