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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#51

Post by gsreenivas »

stevehawk wrote: post #36

I feel like I'm the target market for this as I pay for Fastmail .. 1 - how many domains can I use? I currently use ~6 with my Fastmail account 2 - can I have multiple users? I recognize that fastmail doesn't let me but at this price point I would want it. It looks like you support that but I'm unsure. 3 - How do you convince my ISP to let me receive traffic on the ports required to run a mail server? (most firewall…

hey stevehawk - thanks for your questions. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Helm. Let me take them one by one: 1 - how many domains can I use? Each Helm Personal Server currently supports 1 domain 2 - Can I have multiple users? Yes, we have no limits on the number of users. 3 - Please see my response above about how we navigate around ISPs blocking ports. We route traffic through an EC2 instance with an iptables configuration and an outbound VPN connection. We utilize Let's Encrypt certs for this traffic to be encrypted with TLS. 4 - I've run my own email server for 15 years. It's a pain and more and more people are willing to pay for convenience and peace of mind that comes from a dedicated team like ours looking out for them.

On the meat - we have a post coming tomorrow that is the first in a series where we will dive into the technology.

Regarding Firefox issues, please email me at giri@thehelm.com and we'll look into it. We have avid Firefox users on our team and did test it but may have missed some things.

Thanks for your questions and let me know if I can answer any more.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#53

Post by keehun »

gsreenivas wrote: post #43
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…

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 fr…

For the most advanced of users, would you opensource the server so that we can host our own gateway servers instead of relying on Helm? That would solve the "what happens if Helm goes down" question and "how do we trust Helm" question.

Still wouldn't solve "how do I know my emails won't end up in spam" but at least we're getting closer (to at least what I would want to pay for.)

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#54

Post by kachurovskiy »

I wish them all the best but I don't know a single person in the market for this. For geeks, programmers and DIY folks it's overpriced, for the casual user the benefits are questionable - you're switching from a proven, free blackbox (GMail) to an unproved, paid blackbox. It's a tough market to enter, I guess.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#55

Post by ajross »

_verandaguy wrote: post #24
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.

It's not enforced. I've had HTTP and SSH available on Comcast and Verizon lines for... decades, I guess. No one cares.

SMTP is more problematic because of spam: outbound traffic on port 25 is blocked, so a true home mail server won't work without a reachable gateway mail server somewhere else. That's basically what the linked product is: they manage the protocol side of the service on your behalf, and forward all the content to your local device which connects to them via some internal protocol.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#56

Post by heavenlyhash »

bachmeier wrote: post #34

$99/year? They are targeting an extremely small market. I can get Fastmail for a fraction of that amount, and I don't see much of an advantage with this - and I'm one of the few willing to pay for something I get elsewhere for free.

I mean, "a fraction" is "half" in this case, which is actually pretty close to par in my mind. And that's what I pay for one address for a year; so if this is more addresses and more domains at better scaling prices, that's quite interesting.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#57

Post by scott00 »

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…

You are correct. However I think in practice you can get away with it if you keep bandwidth low. I've been running a OwnCloud/NextCloud server from my residential Comcast account for years with no issues.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#58

Post by jawns »

gsreenivas wrote: post #43
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…

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 fr…

Thank you for this very informative reply. (I hope you'll put this information in a more prominent place on your site.)

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#59

Post by gsreenivas »

apo wrote: post #47

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. 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?

Hi apo - Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm here. The gateway funnels packets to and from the Helm servers in people's homes. These are packets of encrypted TLS sessions so we can't do anything with this traffic. Happy to answer any further questions or concerns.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#60

Post by dagi3d »

gsreenivas wrote: post #43
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…

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 fr…

I thought that sending email from EC2 instance was not allowed and only option was using their SES service.
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