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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

81–90 of 592 posts

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#81
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…

[deleted]

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's interesting that Amazon is portrayed as the "massive corporate server" provider that stores your email "outside your home" on your homepage, yet you use AWS EC2 instances to pipe email traffic to/from Helm. I understand that it's just an encrypted VPN connection, and are not actually storing email on the EC2 instances. But is there any way for your customers to ensure that? Can your customers shell into the Helm…

We will be making public the configuration for these instances as part of what we publish in open source. We haven't considered allowing customers remote access to the gateway but we will based on your suggestion. Thanks!

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#83
> While offline, emails sent to you will not be delivered. This does not, however, mean that they are lost. ... the sender’s email server will periodically retry sending the email at a later time.

It could be interesting to see whether MTAs evolve away from that design feature/constraint. Email seems ever-more centralized. Then again, it's a great robustness feature with a very small downside if any, so hopefully it's just my paranoia.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#84
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure it's allowed, it's just that you'll get caught in every spam filter. I don't know if they've considered that problem, or they're just hoping that using the same IPs long-term will fix the problem in reputation-based blacklists.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#86
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can request email sending support when you set up reverse DNS.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#87
post #41

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...

How do you think I make my money at my job?

Tag a few high level corp accounts and play the market as deals are closed over gmail accounts.

+17% on Twilio buying Sendmail just this month :)

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#88
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I found the answer by clicking Technology from the top menu, and the explanation is the very first paragraph to be read.

“To a unique gateway” with a static IP is hardly an actual answer. Under whose AWS account is this server provisioned? Who has root?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#89
post #76

Honest question - What's up with that form factor? Seems designed to take up more space than necessary. Is there some reason for it or was it just an aesthetic choice?

They say the units will be stackable to increase storage capacity. The form factor seems suitable to that. Seems like it would also allow airflow on the bottom side without visible vents.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#90
post #65

I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center. - You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too. - Disk failure may lose all your data. - Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it. - You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the…

I fail to see the point here -- data centers suffer partially or entirely from each point you referenced
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