"April is the cruelest month", according to American/English poet T.S. Eliot, and I can't disagree with him, at least as far as 2025 goes. I apologize that this progress update is a little later than usual; what's more, this update actually covers both March and April, since they turned into a kind of two-month rolling farce, and in the confusion and muddle I overlooked the March update - my apologies for that too. 1: Hardware March/April was when my development systems decided to play up. First my DNS server died, leaving me effectively inaccessible from the outside world and scrambling to come up with an alternative solution in a hurry. And no sooner had I dealt with that than my actual development host system began crashing on a regular basis. I do all my development in a VirtualBox VM, partly for convenience, and partly for data security, so having the system that hosts it crashing all the time is not ever going to be something I can tolerate. In the end, I took the system back to the people who built it for diagnosis and repair, meaning that I was without my most basic tools for several days. Fortunately the problem was just a broken CPU cooler, and thus not too expensive to repair, but it was still lost time. 2: My Arm This was also the time where my arm decided to play up. I have had a fairly serious case of RSI (called "OOS" these days, I believe) in my right arm since the start of the year, but it got quite severe in March, continuing into April. Because I spend more or less my whole life typing, RSI is a common problem for me, but normally it's a nuisance for a month or so then fades away. This time, it's lasting longer than usual, and the pain means that I simply cannot work at my normal levels. 3: Transitioning to local hosting for pmail.com This one is still a problem, although it has changed a bit recently. The actual new hosting code in Mercury works really well, and I'm very satisfied with it, but in the process of reworking the MercuryB module to be a more modern web server, I have somehow managed to break the operating environment for existing Mercury services, and am having a certain amount of trouble fixing that. The problem here is mainly that the service interface I have broken is a public specification, so I can't just change it wholesale, because there may be people out there who depend on it. I believe I'm close to getting it sorted out now (lots of debugging and code tracing), and when I do get it going, I'll post an interim progress update here to announce that. 4: It's not all doom and gloom, though. On a positive note, I have managed to get a certain level of support for the ACME protocol (free SSL certificates from LetsEncrypt) working in Mercury to a level where automated renewal is possible. This will be in the upcoming update along with the new DKIM code which has benefited from the longer than intended release delay by getting a whole lot of extended testing. The new website hosting functionality will also be a part of the new release, scheduled for as soon as possible after the pmail.com hosting issues have been resolved. I'm also in the process of packaging up a WinPMail v4.91 release which will formalize things in the v4.81 public beta. That will definitely be out this month. While there's not a vast amount of new stuff in v4.91 if you currently use v4.81, it is internally quite a lot more evolved than v4.81 was, making more and better use of the new tools I've written in the last couple of years. It will provide a stable platform that will allow me to ease into early releases of whatever we're going to call the next generation of WinPMail over the course of the remainder of the year. So, as you can see, it's been a complicated couple of months, but I think I'm more or less back on track now - watch this space for more reliable updates in future. All the best, -- David --