Yeah, old topic but it was what I ran into when trying to learn something about bitmessage. Bitmessage is definitely not dead. Ok, I'm not an expert and they do a horrible job at PR but the last pull request was merged
three days ago and the network is up and running. I received my first messages and running the client for several days did not experience any issues.
Edit: Contact me under BM-NB9vUi2crQR9Sa35RkQtFHNkTUKmDvYr