At the time of writing, a person who wants to get online with eDonkey right away, and does not want to bother with details, will have a difficult time with eDonkey. However, a person who is willing to spend some time reading, and learning about eDonkey, will be able to use it quickly and easily to download files.
eDonkey views files in terms of chunks, because of this, even if an eDonkey client only has a single chunk of a file, that client could still be sending that chunk to other users who do not have it, while still downloading other chunks.
Another advantage of eDonkey, is that hyperlinks can be used to allow a person to download files, or connect to a particular server on the eDonkey network. This has resulted in the creation of websites and bulletin boards, for posting those links, such as: ShareReactor (http://www.sharereactor.com) and FileNexus (http://www.filenexus.com)
These are the ports that eDonkey uses:
TCP 4661: This port is the default port that an eDonkey server listens for connections on.
TCP 4662: This port is used for clients to connect to each other. If you have a firewall, this is the port that needs to be forwarded to the computer which is running eDonkey.
UDP 4665: This port is open on an eDonkey server, and is used for clients to communicate with a server other than the one they are currently connected to.