Messenger

The decentralized messenger uses the Bitmessage protocol to send and receive messages.

How BitMessage works

As described in Wikipedia:

Bitmessage is a decentralized, encrypted, peer-to-peer, trustless
communications protocol that can be used by one person to send
encrypted messages to another person, or to multiple subscribers.

BitMessage uses identity addresses that look like this:

BM-87UXauazkpobLFEY4x6i2i631r48QySZr53

You should communicate your BitMessage identity address only to the people who want to contact you. From the messenger, clicking on the clipboard icon on the top-left will copy your current BitMessage address to the clipboard.

Sending messages

Composing a new message

From the messenger, click on Compose. The To compose field, as with traditional mail clients, corresponds to the recipient of your message.

You can type/paste a BitMessage address manually, or type the name of a contact that you’ve stored (when you select a contact, its BM address will be used).

Speed of message delivery

Although BitMessage is pretty fast (and fast enough), the speed with which it delivers messages should not be compared to that of other legacy mailing protocols such as SMTP and others, since they differ so much in regards to security and protocol complexity.

Proof-of-Work

BitMessage, like blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin, uses a concept known as proof-of-work.

The bitmessage client will always compute a Proof-of-work when sending a message. You’ll notice a CPU spike in the notbit process, which is normal. After a short amount of time (which really depends on the capacities of your CPU and the size of the message), you’ll get a system tray notification confirming the POW has been calculated and that your message was acknowledged.

After sending a message, do NOT quit the application until you have have seen the system tray notification for the Proof-of-Work