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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#241

Post by paraditedc »

I read the whole tech page and some of the comments here. I might be willing to pay for this service, but not in its current form. I wouldn't want to spend 500USD on a proprietary hardware in addition to paying a subscription fee. What needs to happen to convince me to pay:

Open up the hardware component as a platform for anyone to extend (allowing direct ssh, or using my own hardware). It's fine to not open source the email server code. But I would like to utilize the hardware to do other things, like file storage, etc. Instead of waiting for your company to build other features, I would rather have community contributed (preferably open source) plugins that integrates with your ecosystem and runs on the hardware.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#242

Post by Legogris »

canthonytucci wrote: post #48

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/

For devops/ops/cloud folks, Helm the k8s package manager will be the first thing that comes to mind.

https://github.com/helm/helm

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#243

Post by garry »

lvh wrote: post #223
icedchai wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this service, yes. That is because not every internet connection can actually successfully run an email server, which proves my point...

I wasn't debating your point; I was pointing out how this service accomplishes it without tripping over that problem. FWIW: I'm not sure that's actually how it works.

The device talks to an AWS EC2 proxy IP that Helm makes sure isn't on an IP blacklist. All traffic that goes through that is TLS encrypted using Lets Encrypt keys.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#245

Post by tinus_hn »

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…

One of the reasons you need net neutrality.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#247

Post by forapurpose »

ryan-c wrote: post #238
forapurpose wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your Helm server will then initiate a TLS session with the server hosting your recipient's email I'm not sure how Helm doesn't see the metadata: * For outbound (as described) and inbound mail, do all mail servers support TLS connections? I was under them impression that many still communicate unencrypted. * How does Helm avoid seeing the metadata, who is communicating with whom and when?

WRT to TLS, see here: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h... It seems that Helm has no obligation or business need to log any metadata if they are providing each customer with a dedicated relay. Any abuse will come from that relay IP and can trivially be attributed to the correct customer.

> Helm has no obligation or business need to log any metadata

The point of Helm is to provide privacy (and end-user control) through technical means, if I understand correctly. If it's just a matter of trusting motives, I don't need a home server.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#248

Post by scott00 »

Aeolun wrote: post #146
scott00 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. However I think in practice you can get away with it if you keep bandwidth low. I've been running a OwnCloud/NextCloud server from my residential Comcast account for years with no issues.

Meanwhile, I installed backblaze on my home machine, which started backing up around 500gb of my disk, and summarily got a message from my provider that outbound traffic of 30gb is an ‘inconceivable’ amount of traffic during normal use, and if I could please stop, or else (lawyers). I wonder what happens if nextcloud does a full sync to a new device.

What provider? That behavior deserves a name-and-shame.

As far as what happens with a full sync: it's not really doable outside of the LAN for several reasons. One is I have a data cap from Comcast of 1 TB/month. Another is the upload speed is only 10 Mbps. That's actually one of the reasons I went to self hosting.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#249

Post by kjullien »

Can anybody explain why they want me to buy a 500$ piece of hardware? Can the same result not be achieved with a Raspberry Pi and any self-hosted open-source mail server?

Why is this not simply a download?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#250

Post by garry »

simias wrote: post #194

So this is bikeshed territory but what with the shape of the "box"? You can't stack anything on it and it seems to take much more room than necessary that way. Reading the (mouse hijacking) technology page I see: >Helm is a high-performance server with capabilities normally found in larger, business-class hardware. To accomplish this performance in a smaller (and quieter) form factor, Helm has been engineered to diss…

The design actually allows for server stacking when you need more compute or storage. It does fully passive cooling with no fan.
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