I would never invest in anything like this because we should all be making strides to kill email not make it better or owning it or building services around 40 year old tech.
What's wrong with email?
Helm: Personal Email Server
161–170 of 592 posts
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#162If you have to rely on propriety code which makes a constant connection to a server hosted on AWS, I don't see any benefit over Fastmail or Proton. It's less secure and has a higher failure rate.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
One key principle for Helm is that you always hold your encryption keys to all your data— Helm and outside parties should never get access to that. So the backups are encrypted, and the Helm device itself stores your data in an encrypted fashion on its storage, and has a secure enclave such that those keys never enter user memory space.
Hosted services like protonmail (great option) support some key management but that's rare. Most everyone stores all your data in the clear, and that sets you up for Facebook-style hacks where people just steal a database en masse, and/or leave you open to warrantless wiretap which has been a problem for email services broadly in the past.
I want to point out that email is just the first part of what Helm wants to do. What is super valuable is that Helm can run its own software and add things like distributed anonymized VPN, or file sharing, and these things are all federated in a way that wasn't possible before.
Not everyone is going to care about this, but enough people should. People reading this thread should care: decentralization and federation of this sort is the way we maintain an open Internet. You can take down individual nodes but you can't take down millions of them. That's the ultimate goal of Helm.
Remember, there's no such thing as a cloud, it's just someone else's computer.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#164I 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…
The cloud ultimately is someone else's computer, abstracted away to feel good. Data loss occurs in the cloud too and it sucks. It's also dangerous to say because you don't understand or see the value in something, that there possibly can't be any. Today's home connectivity + LTE fail over is reasonable to rely on. One could put a vps proxy in front of it if you really wanted. Running a home appliance is not out of th…
So what happens when you are traveling and there's a power issue or maybe some other connection issue that knocks this box out of service? Looks like you'll be stuck without email until you can physically get back to this box. This isn't a scenario you worry about with regular email.
The challenge with email is that once you give out any mail address to people, you are on the hook to ensure that it's a functional address. Not something you can just try for 6 months and then easily move on from. And if you decide to move on from this service, will the average person be able to easily migrate that custom domain to a different email provider? (Yes, technically this is possible, but can normal users do it easily? Is it part of the service that Helm provides?)
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#165I would never invest in anything like this because we should all be making strides to kill email not make it better or owning it or building services around 40 year old tech.
What else should we use? The letter paradigm is fairly universal.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> You could run a managed cloud e-mail service where only the users hold the encryption keys, too. How is this a hardware problem? This is the key question, in my mind. There's only one reason I'd want to own the hardware—to manage/add/create my own services and handle my own backups because I don't trust a company's involvement in these[0]. If this is so tightly controlled that I can't add my own services and I can'…
This is a valuable and useful criticism and we're going to talk about this at our next board meeting.
How do you know who to trust? You surely have to trust someone. It feels generally true that we can trust Apple since we pay them for hardware and their ongoing business interest is in protecting their revenue streams through their hardware and iOS app store, which means you are aligned.
Generally for Helm that's a good case. That's why we charge money for this hardware and software: it aligns interest.
Free cloud services are not truly free and that's what most people seem to be OK with... but not all people.
This is the classic trade-off. Open source software you can read the code but usability suffers. For the people on HN, most people can run their own servers, but for normal people that's not an option.
Apple has managed to create a computing environment that is highly usable for normal people. This is what Helm is trying to do too.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#167[deleted]
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#168Earlier 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?
Hey cwyers - this is a good question. Our offsite backups use keys that only a Helm customer has access to. They are created during the setup process and stored on a USB thumb drive we include in the box as well as your phone. We will be publishing how this is done using duplicity so people can see the details of how it works.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#169I 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…
> I definitively believe that we need to fix the way email is handled, but I don't think this is the solution.
Sorry, I respectfully disagree. We shouldn't fix email, we should throw it away and replace it.
It is almost impossible to have secure email that can't be eavesdropped, even with PGP. Normal people just don't get the need for security and can't bother the hassle of encrypting their email.
Also, from an usability perspective, email was a solution for an age without mobile computing.
What we need is something like Signal: instant messaging with privacy built in by default.
Re: Helm: Personal Email Server
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm easy to find on the internet. me@garrytan.com