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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#91

Post by bpye »

dagi3d wrote: post #60
gsreenivas wrote: post #43

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 guess email can be sent from the residential connection but recieved through EC2?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#92

Post by Hello71 »

rataata_jr wrote: post #6
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…

There are very good open source projects, namely rspamd etc.

That helps check that you don't receive spam (and even so, rspamd is much weaker when applied to only one account). It doesn't fix sending other people what looks like spam.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#93

Post by djsumdog »

ajross wrote: post #55
_verandaguy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AT&T in the midwest US just blocked port 25 a few months ago. My nightly e-mails for system updates stopped coming in, and now I either have to shuttle them through an authenticated submission port or pump them over a VPN to my e-mail server. :-/

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#94

Post by specialp »

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…

If you are proxying the content with a VPN with a static IP on an EC2 instance you cannot police people sending out spam as you cannot see and meter the SMTP traffic. So does everyone get a dedicated instance and IP? If that is the case people are going to have issues getting their email accepted by almost all providers due to the IP being new and on a cloud provider block. If it is a subset of IPs that you create a reputation for and comply with DKIM, SPF etc how are you going to keep it from getting ruined by bad actors?

I am glad you are doing this because running a mail server is non trivial. I have done it for a long time now and love the fact that I own my email identity. It is one of the few things left you can own online.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#95

Post by cwyers »

andr wrote: 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…

Yeah, there is no convenient backup policy that doesn't obviate most of the purported benefits of this device. You have to store your backups somewhere off-site to have any kind of data safety, and unless you're dumping out to tapes or some other physical media and stashing your backups in a safety deposit box, that's going to be a server somewhere.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#97

Post by freen »

freen wrote: post #77

Try https://mailinabox.email It's rad, does all of the DNS/SSL/DKIM foo necessary to make your email fully deliverable, includes contacts and calendar sync, is multi-user, multi-domain, etc.

Or, if you want something a bit more, well, everything and the kitchen sink: https://yunohost.org

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#98

Post by ryandrake »

heavenlyhash wrote: post #56
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.

I pay ~$5/mo for a VPS that I have root on and host E-mail for an unlimited number of domains, plus I can use it for other purposes: light duty web site, VPN, etc.

I don’t seem to be the target market for this but I wish them well—we need more effort towards re-decentralizing E-mail.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#99

Post by andr »

jimmy1 wrote: post #90
andr wrote: 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

I mean, the risks exist in the sense they are not absolutely zero, but can you seriously compare an average home to a data center in terms of physical security, connectivity, fire suppression, etc.?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#100

Post by plopz »

lwf wrote: post #29

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 decentrali…

I wonder if they check that the IP addrs they use are in good standing with the large mail receivers or if they somehow pre-warm the IP with "good" email.
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