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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#111

Post by garry »

joshstrange wrote: post #101
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…

This was my first thought as well. My email IS very important to me which is exactly why I will never host it locally. The only content I host locally-only is stuff I would be annoyed to lose but could replace, the only content I host locally with online backup is stuff I can do without for a couple of days while I recover. Email falls into neither of those categories, I need it to be up all the time. I have consider…

I've been running my email on Helm for the past month with no dropouts of service - it's worked with no issues this whole time, and we use Comcast in SF, so it's not the best upstream there is.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#112

Post by Taranli_Maren »

gsreenivas wrote: post #59
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.

That is not entirely true. Perhaps in the stated configuration it is, but since the domain points to the EC2 instance, you could always register a new LetsEncrypt certificate for it, and do a silent MITM.

Perhaps the architecture you describe is the best, however I would hope for two things to be supported: 1) The ability to run your own gateway server instead of having to trust one managed by your company. 2) The ability to disable the gateway entirely if you happen to have a business connection already.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#113

Post by garry »

cwyers wrote: post #108
garry wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the first and biggest investor in Helm and I'm on the board. I created email-based Posterous previously (YC funded) and was a YC partner for 5 years. I funded this team because they're high integrity software engineers first, and we built this out of need— a company like this needs to exist because for this to work, you need both great user experience as well as great software. Helm actually solves this exactly -…

If I can trust someone to do off-site cloud backups of my e-mail, why can't I trust the same person to run a Fastmail-like service so I don't have to have a $500 server in my house to get e-mail?

Because with Helm only you hold the encryption keys.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#114

Post by cwyers »

garry wrote: post #113
cwyers wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I can trust someone to do off-site cloud backups of my e-mail, why can't I trust the same person to run a Fastmail-like service so I don't have to have a $500 server in my house to get e-mail?

Because with Helm only you hold the encryption keys.

But that's completely orthogonal to owning a piece of hardware. You could run a managed cloud e-mail service where only the users hold the encryption keys, too. How is this a hardware problem?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#116

Post by TheSmiddy »

djsumdog wrote: post #93
ajross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :-/

An ISP I worked for blocked port 25 in 2009, but it was easily reenabled by the customer checking a box in their online portal.

Considering how easily it is to setup authenticated SMTP and how effective it is at reducng spam for the ISP, I'm Surprised it took AT&T this long.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#117

Post by voidmain0001 »

davidmr wrote: post #88
voidmain0001 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It was enough to answer user jawns' question.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#119

Post by djsumdog »

wpietri wrote: post #27
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 n…

So if they route everything through the same set of EC2 instances, that might actually take care of the SPAM issue. I run my own e-mail server and have run into that same issue of not being able to send to gmail/microsoft addresses (unless I contact the person via Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. and tell them to check their spam folder):

https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made...

The way most of these providers deal with spam is they slowly white-list IP addresses. When a company like Mailchip or Mailgun spin up a new server, it's always in a large subnet range they've purchased and they slowly start sending low priority e-mail through it to existing/known receivers and throttle it up to full speed.

If you're running a personal server that sends like 5 or 6 e-mails a days, well that's an issue.

The big players make it difficult to run a small personal server, but running a dedicated business or corporate server that sends 100s of e-mails per day is typically fine once it's well established.

You know what would be a better product? A relay SMTP server that works with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Fastmail et. al. to pump e-mail from personal servers and ensures it won't get caught in spam filters.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#120

Post by moviuro »

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…

Redundancy redundancy redundancy. See e.g. Unison, rsync, sanoid or https://syncthing.net - runs on anything, does a good job.

> You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the EC2 proxy (in this case).

Because you read all code changes every time you `pkg upgrade` or `dpkg dist-update`.

> Many home ISPs have shitty upload connectivity, so your email won't work that well on the go.

Is that really an issue? I probably use Also, the "on-the-go" issue is DL speed: from your device to your server. How long your server takes to send the mail is mostly irrelevant - instantaneous transmission should be done by phone.

> Internet and power outages mean you won't send or receive any email.

More comments around here about sending servers that MUST retry, and fail only after a few days.

> You lose the knowledge email providers get from scale, including ever-evolving spam filters, and a guaranteed clean outgoing IP.

That could be a real issue, but the ever-evolving filters at my ISP clearly can't spot (nor stop) the spam I receive anyway.

The outgoing IP shouldn't be a problem if you've registered it in your DNS, and it matches the SMTP or whatever subdomain.

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