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Helm: Personal Email Server

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#181

Post by garry »

balabaster wrote: post #147

This is my perspective alone and isn't meant to sway anyone's opinion, this is just my experience as it's been. Having owned and run my own mail servers myself for some 10 years, I'll tell you something for nothing. Owning your own mail server is not something that comes for free. At least, it wasn't for me. Unless your product has brought something that's drastically different in terms of software, security and spam…

Helm was built specifically for you. I know because I had to run dozens of mail servers myself for email-to-blog platform Posterous, my startup 10 years ago. It was terrible.

I've been up and running with Helm for the past month on my garrytan.com email domain and it's been zero maintenance.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#182

Post by lvh »

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…

What else runs on that EC2 instance?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#183

Post by gsreenivas »

Guest9812398 wrote: post #152
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 apa…

Using a hardware root of trust, secure boot and a Secure Enclave for managing keys used for full disk encryption, it will be very difficult to extract decrypted data from a Helm server. The keys never leave the Secure Enclave, they aren't available to the application processor or memory.

Most cloud-based email services hold email in the clear - we believe this means you don't really own your data. Encrypted email services have challenges around search, access via proprietary protocols and the risks of running highly sensitive operations in client-side javascript.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#184

Post by ThePhysicist »

garry wrote: post #105
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…

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 -…

Hey, since you're here already, I have some questions (in case you're able/allowed to answer them):

What's the base operating system and hardware architecture the box is based on? It says "Linux" on the page but doesn't go into specifics.

Why not just use regular hardware, e.g. Intel NUCs, or even allow people to run your software on their own hardware (like OwnCloud does)?

In Germany there was/is a startup, Protonet (https://protonet.com/), that had almost the exact same idea a while ago. They went bankrupt though and one of the reasons was that it cost a ton of money to design and produce their own hardware, which also looked very cool (orange hexagon!) but didn't provide much added value beyond what a normal, boring-looking compact PC could provide (at 500 € less than their box for the same specs). They also marketed their own OS, which was based on a modified Linux distribution, modified open-source software and a shiny management layer on top as well. They found out that developing and maintaining a Linux fork isn't so easy either, so they eventually canned it. So what's different about Helm in your opinion?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#186

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

I think the only times I lost data in the last 10 years or so was because someone accidentally deleted stuff on a shared Dropbox (luckily I had a local backup, so only the most recent changes got lost). Oh and I lost some photos that I uploaded to a Facebook clone because they more or less shut down.

Data loss is more or less a solved problem. You don't need Google for that. ;-)

On the other hand, even without putting my tin hat on: I get customized ads best on my email contents, WTF?! Everybody can see based on the browser ads what kind of sites I'm surfing to.

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

Except if you have a charged battery and LTE. ;-) In fact just a charged battery is needed when network is down to read old mails.

> Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it.

Solved problem. Encryption...

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#187

Post by xienze »

Wow, $500 for the device and $100 per year for service? AND the usual concerns about keeping the device up and running?

What honestly makes this more appealing than $50 per year for Fastmail?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#188

Post by gsich »

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…

Most games on consoles setup listen servers, which is essentially the same thing.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#189

Post by garry »

vxNsr wrote: post #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…

If I have a Helm device and you have a Helm device, and we both use iPhones, that's a pretty good scenario. All the devices are trusted and run signed audited code, and my email passes from my iPhone to yours purely encrypted at every stage, with no intermediaries having access to the plaintext.

And neither of us have to change apps or behavior.

This is pretty good.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#190

Post by sjs382 »

garry wrote: post #163
cwyers wrote: post #114

Earlier 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?

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 th…

> You can take down individual nodes but you can't take down millions of them.

This statement indicates a lot of passion (and I side with it in spirit), but it feels irrelevant and out of place wrt/ this product.

My data is only (available from) my own private Helm server. If mine gets taken down, the existence of millions of other "nodes" doesn't help me. Helm the company can help me with new hardware and my backups, presuming that they're allowed to—but what if they aren't. Then we're back in the same place.

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