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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

11–20 of 592 posts

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#12
post #8

The hardware looks slick, but are my emails going to bounce when my not commercial comcast/spectrum/at&t/whoever has a maintenance outage? I'm not sure it's too useful to bring that out of the datacenter and into my house...

Most SMTP hosts will automatically retry a few times at spaced intervals if they can’t reach their destination host in first attempt.

Yea, they will retry for 48 hours before a message is marked as undeliverable.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#14
post #2

What happens when there is a power or ISP outage?

MTAs will retry delivery for up to a week. There are other options for more advanced usage though, e.g. one can configure multiple mail servers with different priorities, `the helm` having the highest priority and if it's down a MTA would try the next mail server which could be just a forwarder like mailgun.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#16
post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

If your ISP doesn't let you run your own mail server, they're not an ISP.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#17
post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

Plus they tend to block the ports you need to run something like this.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#18
post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

It's not necesarily banned, but very often port 25 will be blocked. Additionally it's pretty likely your email will be marked as spam if it comes from a residential IP. They must have thought about this though, so maybe they have their own SMTP servers that emails go through.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#19
post #2

What happens when there is a power or ISP outage?

Email has several retries. Something like 6hr, 1day, 2days... After that the sender receives a delivery error.

All that is managed by the SMTP servers and the numbers change, but normally just losing internet connection or power for some hours doesnt make emails dissapear. By design.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#20

The hardware looks slick, but are my emails going to bounce when my not commercial comcast/spectrum/at&t/whoever has a maintenance outage? I'm not sure it's too useful to bring that out of the datacenter and into my house...

Hey there, I'm Giri Sreenivas, co-founder of Helm. Glad you like the hardware! Good question on email bounces. As Arubis mentioned, email has retry built in and most servers default to retrying for 48-72 hours.
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