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⚠ Notice of Service Termination ⚠

This service has been terminated due to decreasing user demand.

From the statistics of expired accounts it was clearly visible that the service was mostly used as a throwaway address service. Only a handful of people were using the service as a bitmessage gateway, and a fair few treated it as a regular E-mail service. The number of people abusing the service had increased over the lifetime of the service. And although there were never any legal complications for the owner, dealing with legal requests is time consuming and not rewarding.

The official bitmessage client has not seen any notable changes lately. Development has mostly halted. No vialbe alternate clients have been developed either.

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

Shutdown timeline

The service was gradually shut down.

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. Deny all incoming E-mails as of 2019-12-01. You will no longer be able to receive messages after that.
4. Take the E-mail handler completely offline on 2020-01-01. You will no longer be able to log into your account after that
5. Clear secret key storage for mailboxes and bitmessage addresses on 2020-02-01.
6. Delete all remaining accounts at 2020-06-01.
7. Take the service offline at 2021-01-01.

Future of this Service

Bitmessage.ch and related domains have entered a minimal maintenance state. No services apart from this termination page are provided from this domain anymore.

Unaffected services

We run multiple bitmessage services that will continue as of now:

• The Timeservice Broadcast
• 24x7 List. The first bitmessage mailing list to be online all the time. Address: BM-GuRLKDhQA5hAhE6PDQpkcvbtt1AuXAdQ
• BitText, an anonymous, bitmessage accessible variant of Pastebin.

Thank You

I want to thank the people that used the service the way it was intended and those who donated to it.
This was never meant to blow up the way it did in 2013 and was only supposed to be a proof of concept. After 6 years there was still no identical and comparable service in existence, yet the userbase has dwindled. This shows that there is no demand for this kind of service. Regular encrypted E-mail systems exist already.

Last meaningful change: 2022-07-27 - Bitmessage.ch Administrator