Sadly, I believe I've run into a pretty solid wall with Pocomail and Barca development: it is now obvious to me that I can not reasonably expect to release an update to either Pocomail or Barca that I would feel comfortable charging money for.
As I wrote before, Pocomail 5 has been an elusive goal for me: a combination of ever-expanding requirements due to Pocomail's aging development environment and Microsoft's push into new technologies with Windows 7 and just announced changes to Windows 8. Pocomail 4.9 was just a little more achievable, the beta I have right now has a lot of rough edges and bringing the new HTML components to a release-ready state will be tough (releasing it as beta is a different matter). If the market for third-party email software was healthy these would be fights worth fighting for but our experience has been the exact opposite.
As our revenue has been steadily decreasing it is not even possible to invest and hire out to overcome this hurdle. I don't mind if I don't make money out of Pocomail going forward and even supporting it financially to keep the community going, but I would need to find the right people to help as my skill set is no longer optimally used for development. Pocomail platform would need to be pushed into the future, into something more modern than Delphi. I've taken on more product manager roles in side projects to keep my family solvent, and I realize that is where my strength is today. Sadly, it is hard to motivate outside programmers to modernize a project like Pocomail in the days of Gmail, app stores, tablets, etc.
I realize I cannot keep hoping that the right solution or the right partner will come along - you guys using Pocomail and Barca need to make decisions yourself, especially as Windows 8 starts coming up on the horizon. For this reason I just don't think it's fair to maintain Pocomail or Barca as a paid product beyond the end of this year. If the situation changes and I was able to find the right person to help continue Pocomail legacy I will gladly change my mind.
I will continue hosting the download and the forum, and will continue support for 6 months after we stop selling it. I will also try to get the 4.9 beta somewhat polished off and release it, but this build will likely not get released as the official version.
This is a really hard decision as I hear from you every week, and I know how you feel - having to put to rest years of work and many thousands of lines of code that still fill my head will be incredibly hard. But I realize that things are not likely to get any better in 2012 for my little email software.
The software may fade away but the friendships I made through it are real, I hope to keep in touch - you're welcome to a free license of whatever I do next.
Best,
Slaven.