There are already some existing Bitmessage gateways such as http://bitmsg.cc/ http://bitmsg.cc/. Looks like using something like this would be a better solution

There are already some existing Bitmessage gateways such as http://bitmsg.cc/ http://bitmsg.cc/. Looks like using something like this would be a better solution for a Lavabit-successor: Use a secure messaging protocol and then only use gateways to send messages between the traditional email world and your own secure protocol. Of course, the gateway could still log your messages, but the same security issue applied to Lavabit. The main advantage is that once the gateway has forwarded your message, no one can force the operator to retroactively decrypt the message. Bitmessage sounds like one potential solution for this, but it has some scalability issues. Using RetroShare would be another approach.