171–180 of 592 posts
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.
Unix, vim, emacs, lisp, the shell, and even the web itself is all old tech at this point. Old doesn't have to mean bad. It's tech that's stood the test of time.
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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 add…
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I thought that sending email from EC2 instance was not allowed and only option was using their SES service.
You can send email from an EC2 instance but good luck getting anyone to accept it. A lot of email providers block EC2 wholesale, or if they do accept it you are going to have to have a long standing reputation.
edit: I guess I should be clear that I have an elastic IP (which is free) and setup reverse DNS and DKIM and SPF, but I think those are fairly standard now a days (I don't know honestly I've only run an email server for a few months).
1) Is email access provided through the Helm App, SMTP/IMAP, or is there a webmail interface as well? Can you use this device without a smartphone?
2) Which Linux distro is this based on?
3) What file system is used? Is it something like ZFS or BTRFS, which could protect against corruption? Since there seems to be only one drive, I assume there is no RAID-like redundancy included to protect against drive failure?
4) Where are the encrypted backups stored? What is the procedure for recovering them? I expect that the backup recovery keys are also stored offline on the flash drive?
5) How are software updates performed? Are they pushed from a managed system that you control, or does the device itself pull updates automatically on a schedule? How long will you guarantee software updates for? If you stop providing them, or are slow to patch a vulnerability, is there any way for the user to patch the device themselves? Local SSH access perhaps?
Lastly, a comment, please consider not overriding the scroll behaviour on your website. It may look slick when it works, but when it doesn't (as it doesn't on my Firefox), it totally breaks the website. In the case of your technology page, it is super-annoying, since the details I want are at the bottom, and I'm forced to watch the slideshow before I can see them.
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 -…
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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
I will be surprised if this takes off. Sounds like a glorified Western Digital's MyCloud with a raspberry pi server... Also that annual subscription is a joke after purchasing the hard disk outright.
> Internet service providers normally don’t provide their customers with networking capabilities that are required to run an email server. In most cases, upgrading to an expensive business class internet service is needed. The subscription service that is part of the Helm service handles this for you without you having to upgrade your ISP.
> We handle all fees associated with domain registration and renewal when you create a new domain for your Helm. In addition, we also provide storage for offsite encrypted backups and include access to new features, service and security patches.