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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#21

Post by vorpalhex »

jawns wrote: 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…

Emphasis added:

> provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network

I'm not sure if Verizon has the same intention, but if they take their own wording exceptionally strict, you would be in the wrong whenever you play a multiplayer game and end up being the host.

Generally in my own experience they don't want you hosting a service opened to the general public running all the time. I think running an open mail relay would get you banned very quick. It seems like this product is intended to be used purely for yourself.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#22

Post by prophesi »

jawns wrote: 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…

Meanwhile, my ISP's customer service gave me a few pointers on how to get my self-hosted website to work with a dynamic IP address.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#23

Post by gsreenivas »

alexkavon wrote: post #13

How hackable is this I wonder? Would just be cool to have a machine this shape. Of course you could probably do the same with a raspberry pi and a 3D printer.

Alex - Giri Sreenivas, co-founder of Helm here. We've designed security from the silicon up to make this device very difficult to hack. That means implementing secure boot, full disk encryption and utilizing a Secure Enclave for managing keys on the device.

And yes, you could definitely do this on a raspberry pi. That's what we used to prototype. It's not great for a long last, durable and secure platform though.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#24

Post by _verandaguy »

jawns wrote: 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…

Holy crap, US ISPs are completely absurd. This definitely isn't a thing (or at least not enforced in any way) in Canada; most of my friends run on-prem web services out of their basements or closets.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#25

Post by asprouse »

aeden wrote: post #15
asprouse wrote: post #2

What happens when there is a power or ISP outage?

They have a sort of FAQ on their shop page that provides info about this: https://thehelm.com/pages/shop See under the question: What happens to my email if my power or Internet service goes out?

Odd that they hide their FAQ in the shop page and hidden below the fold on a 13" screen. I looked everywhere but there. You'd think you most customers would want their questions answered before buying.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#26

Post by okket »

Tharkun wrote: post #16
jawns wrote: 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.

Sure. But good luck getting your mail accepted by other mail servers, coming from a broadband IP address.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#27

Post by wpietri »

keehun wrote: post #3

Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…

Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern. It has been a real struggle for me despite having a server I own in a rack with net-neighbors I know.

Another big one for me is the failure modes. What do I do when my home connection is down? How about when my connection is down and I'm traveling? What happens when the hardware fails? How about when the hardware fails 5 years from now?

Having email just down for a couple days while you wait for new hardware to would be a very bad experience.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#28

Post by erinnh »

fyfy18 wrote: post #18
jawns wrote: 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.

Apparently so:

"Helm connects securely to a unique gateway, which is assigned a static IP address so Helm is reachable by other mail servers and secure TLS sessions can be established."

Which I dont see the point of then. That way they are your gatekeeper of your mail/files etc. Not much of an improvement.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#29

Post by lwf »

They're "solving" the residential ISP email blacklist issue by offering an IPSEC VPN with static addresses they control:

> Helm just works with your home network—no configuration needed. Helm connects securely to a unique gateway, which is assigned a static IP address so Helm is reachable by other mail servers and secure TLS sessions can be established.

A nice approach, but it does sort of chip away at the decentralisation claim that's at the core of their messaging.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#30

Post by jcranmer »

dhruvmittal wrote: post #5

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...

SMTP policy requires retrying if mail cannot be delivered. From RFC 5321 section 4.5.4.1:

> In a typical system, the program that composes a message has some method for requesting immediate attention for a new piece of outgoing mail, while mail that cannot be transmitted immediately MUST be queued and periodically retried by the sender.

[ ... ]

> Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days.

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