Live data from Hacker News

Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

121–130 of 592 posts

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#121
post #45

One 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.

Very ignorant response. It's fairly straightforward to set up SPF for a new domain, and most big emails will follow these policies.

SPF won't help if the spam filter blocks residential addresses outright, which is commonly done using DNSBLs.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#122
post #97
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

Or Homebox: https://github.com/progmaticltd/homebox

Ansible, yaml config, I think only a single domain.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#123
post #105
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'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 -…

I like the idea. But can it handle multiple domains? Also, if I put one in my brother's house, can it connect the two and use them as fail over? That will eliminate my worry about outage and backups.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#124
Services like this are popping up everywhere. It seems to me that daplie's successful indiegogo campaign started it. Of course, daplie was then taken over by cryptocurrency nuts that turned what would have been a good product into a token mining personal server for no good reason.

The founder of daplie is moving on to found ppl, which is also similar to helm, but without email being the primary focus. I started helping with the email feature before getting a new job and not having any spare time for the project. This is a better solution to email than we had come up with.

I still wonder, does one successful kickstarter mean there's enough market demand for these products to succeed? I just can't see personal servers at home becoming anywhere near user friendly enough for the general population. Go try a digital ocean 1-click install 3 times in a row. The results are different every time. I see that same problem happening with these personal servers.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#125
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…

Hi keehun - thanks for posting this on HN! I'm the co-founder and CEO of Helm.

1 - First, we cross reference IP addresses we assign to gateway against known blacklists. This helps ensure emails will be delivered. We also fully support email authentication (DMARC, DKIM, SPF) and configure reverse DNS as well. Lastly, the IP address for a gateway stays fixed so the domain and IP will build reputation over time. Helm servers require the service to work to get around the residential internet connection challenges in the US (port blocking, dynamic IPs, untrusted IPs)

2 - We will be doing 2 things - first, we will publish as open source what is required for people to be able to run their own gateways with their own AWS account in the event Helm has to shut down. Second, the unit economics on the service are positive so as long as we have customers, my co-founder and I are dedicated to running the service. We take a page from Garry Tan and Posthaven in this regard.

3 - The way this works for sending emails, your devices that you compose emails on will connect directly with your Helm server over TLS. Your Helm server will then initiate a TLS session with the server hosting your recipient's email. So we as a company have no visibility to any of that data - at rest, or in transit. I hope this helps - I'm happy to explain this in more detail as needed.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#127

This 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! https://tytel.org/helm/

And then there’s the Emacs plugin by the same name—there’s a lot of things called Helm.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#128
I definitively believe that we need to fix the way email is handled, but I don't think this is the solution.

I wanna get away from "free" email, but I think it requires a more full blown solution, something which offers a client with the polish of gmail.com along with it's excellent spam detection/protection, that can be self hosted on any random computer/server (using docker, or similar) that is very nearly plug and play.

Unfortunately, such a project would need to be OSS, with a consulting-type income structure, but the big companies that would be willing to pay for such a thing all use O365, and would never be willing to try something not nearly as proven.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#129
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. :-/

You can pay $50 and they will open it once again for you. I only know that after much trial and error troubleshooting why my public NTP service doesn’t work (port 123 also blocked).

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#130
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 th…

> 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.

Not commenting on the rest: you download incoming mail from your server, i.e. your home uplink. If someone sends you a photo or zip file, that’s the bottle neck.

Not to mention syncing email with the brain dead protocol that is IMAP…

Post reply on HN