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Helm: Personal Email Server

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#151

Post by tenebrisalietum »

gambler wrote: post #131
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…

It's hilarious how solvable most of these problems are, and yet they aren't even closed to be solved. Like, backups. Everyone knows how this can be done. Have automated scheduled backups. Encrypt them. Send to offsite storage. This should be handled through a generic backup protocol so you can choose your provider and be sure the app doesn't siphon your personal data. Users should not need to manually fuck around to…

Same thing with file transfer. You'd think it'd be a solved, easy thing by now--a gigantic datacenter/cellphone network is not the optimum solution to allow two people or two businesses to transfer a file between them.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#152

Post by Guest9812398 »

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…

Agreed. For a service that is about security, it honestly leaves me feeling very vulnerable, and I wouldn't consider it for that reason. I'm concerned about my emails being delivered, increased spam, a thief (or government employee) walking out of my home with my email server, my modem needing a reboot while I'm on vacation and not being able to send or receive emails, and my neighbor accidentally burning down my apartment, taking my email with it.

I'm a Fastmail user and pretty happy with the service. But, what's the real world benefits of Helm over an encrypted email service, like ProtonMail?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#153

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

Since most email's not encrypted, how is having each Helm user's email hop through your server any better for them in terms of privacy than just hosting their email on a remote mail provider in the first place?

You could still record every incoming and outgoing email as it goes through your server, couldn't you?

I really don't see the advantage of Helm.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#154

Post by lvh »

garry wrote: post #111
joshstrange wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mind sharing your domain? I'd love to peek at what they do DNS-wise. lvh at latacora dot com if you don't just want to hand it to all of HN :) The e-mail in your profile is hosted by Google, which makes sense because it looks like work email.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#155

Post by zrail »

djsumdog wrote: post #119
wpietri wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

"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."

That's basically Sendgrid or Mailgun or even Fastmail itself. They can all relay SMTP for arbitrary domains.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#156

Post by gsreenivas »

Dnguyen wrote: post #123
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 -…

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.

For now, a single domain per server. And yes, mirroring support is coming with 2 servers so you will have the fail over that you mentioned.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#157

Post by lvh »

icedchai wrote: post #136
qwertay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think just about every internet connection can run email just fine.

Not necessarily. Incoming email: port 25 is blocked on many residential connections. Outgoing email: If you send email from a residential IP block you're likely going to be flagged as spam.

If I understand correctly, incoming e-mail actually goes to some EC2 host.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#160

Post by lvh »

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.

Doesn't Helm have RCE on the device at all times? Doesn't all e-mail come in on an EC2 instance, and go out over an EC2 instance?
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