Now that notbit isn’t locking up anymore, it’s worth actually using it — and the friction with any Bitmessage client is that you need a Bitmessage-specific interface. docker-bitmessage removes that: it wraps notbit in a ~20MB Alpine container and exposes it over IMAP and SMTP, so Thunderbird or Apple Mail can talk to the Bitmessage network like it’s just another mail account.
Addresses aren’t real email addresses — they’re <bitmessage-address>@bitmessage — and messages have to stay plain text, no attachments, no HTML. Existing keys from the official PyBitmessage client import directly by copying keys.dat into the container’s volume. It builds for both amd64 and arm, so it runs on a Raspberry Pi as easily as a normal PC.