Related story just popped up on Bloomberg: A majority of board members are still using personal email accounts to share corporate information
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/dusty-pro...
Helm: Personal Email Server
41–50 of 592 posts
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#42Looks quite cool but why put a server into my flat? :thinking:
If I'm somewhere and my internet goes down, I will lose access to everything. And as we all know, stuff will go down at some point (probably at the most inconvenient time).
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#43Don'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…
hey jawns, great question. I'm Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm. To answer your question, ISPs block port 25 and email service providers typically reject emails coming from residential IP blocks.
To build a plug and play solution, we knew that our server could not require listening for inbound connections on a residential internet connection. So we set about looking into how we could route traffic to and from a home server but we needed to do this in a way that prevented us from being able to spy on traffic. We investigated solutions like sshuttle and eventually settled on the combination of a simple iptables configuration combined with a VPN connection. Helm establishes an outbound VPN connection to a dedicated EC2 instance with an iptables configuration that routes packets to and from the connected Helm server. The EC2 instance also has a static IP address associated with it.
It's important to stop here and explain that the only way this architecture is viable while adhering to our design tenet of knowing as little about our customers as possible is because of the Let's Encrypt project. Every Helm server has a unique domain associated with it and trusted certificates for that domain are fetched from Let's Encrypt. We strive to ensure that all inbound and outbound traffic routed through the EC2 instance is using TLS with these certificates from Let's Encrypt. This way, our EC2 instance is effectively just an extra hop on the Internet.
I hope that answers your question, let me know!
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#44Don'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…
Presumably there's a legal argument that you aren't providing a public service. Helm is tunneling SMTP connections from their cloud-based servers to your device over an encrypted connection, so you could claim you're really consuming their service, not providing your own. But I wonder how much VC money you need to outlast Comcast in court...
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#45One of the worst ideas. Every big email provider (gmail, yahoo, outlook ...) do block every mail sent from a home isp. so you will not be able to send anyone a mail.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#46The 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.
This answer implies that you have no idea what the problem is, which doesn't bode well.
The problem is that the major email hosts send to the spam folder any emails from IP addresses they don't explicitly trust.
My solution to this is just to ignore it and tell people if they want to receive my email they should work out how, as the problem is on their end not mine.
But lots of your customers won't like that answer.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#47Helm 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.
This sounds like Helm becomes the email gateway. Sure, an email server might be running on the device, but emails will be routed through Helm the company. Am I missing something?
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#48This looks pretty cool. Very happy to see email space still being explored.
Somewhat off topic, but another nice project named Helm is the Helm Synth by Matt Tytel, which is open source and sounds pretty freakin good!
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#49Don'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.
My Dutch ISP gives me a static IPv4 address (besides an IPv6 netblock) and allows me to purchase additional IPv4 addresses. They also offer various levels of port filtering, from no filtering to filtering port 53, etc.
(Combined with fiber, it's ideal for a small home server.)
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#50Don'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…
Yes. Many also block ports, like incoming port 25 (SMTP.)
I have a "business" cable internet account and have been hosting my servers for years. It is obviously more expensive.