Bitmessage Is Going To Shutdown After 6 Years

Bitmessage is a decentralized, peer-to-peer (P2P) communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers, such that users need not have any concept of public or private keys to use the system.

More than a half year, Bitmessage closed their registration for new users and administrators said this is also the period it takes for old accounts to expire.

From the statistics of the removed accounts, administrators claim they clearly see that the service is mostly used as a throwaway address service. Only a handful of people are using the service as a bitmessage gateway, and a fair few treat it as a regular E-mail service. The number of people abusing the service has increased.

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Summary of Reasons

• Service is not being used for what it was meant to be used for anymore (sending and receiving bitmessages)
• Increasing abuse of the service
• Cost of operation
• Declining interest in bitmessage overall

What Bitmessage users can expect

1. Disable registrations as of 2019-06-01
2. Deny all outgoing E-mails as of 2019-07-01. You will no longer be able to send E-mails after that
3. Take the E-mail handler completely offline on 2020-01-01. You will no longer be able to log into your account after that
4. Clear secret key storage for mailboxes and bitmessage addresses on 2020-02-01.
5. Delete all remaining accounts at 2020-06-01
6. Take the service offline 2021-01-01

How to prepare

If you are one of the handful of people that actually uses the bitmessage network, create a new address at a different provider (or download the client) and inform all your existing contacts to switch to the new address immediately. There are local applications you can run on your computer that simulate an E-Mail service, said by Bitmessage administrator.

Be sure to archive conversations you want to keep.