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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#281

Post by graybolt »

specialp wrote: post #94
gsreenivas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are proxying the content with a VPN with a static IP on an EC2 instance you cannot police people sending out spam as you cannot see and meter the SMTP traffic. So does everyone get a dedicated instance and IP? If that is the case people are going to have issues getting their email accepted by almost all providers due to the IP being new and on a cloud provider block. If it is a subset of IPs that you create a…

I think this is the biggest problem. If there are a lot of bad actors, you drag down the whole system, but if you try to prevent bad actors you run into a lot of issues.

A hard problem, and I don't envy anyone trying to solve it.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#282

Post by icebraining »

msoucy wrote: post #139
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…

OK, tangental but concerning. According to that Comcast quote, are you not actually allowed to host a personal website using bandwidth that you pay for? Or is it specifically forbidding "public" web hosting, where "anybody" is allowed to host their own sites?

I think it's the former; you can't host any site that is supposed to be accessed by the general public, only something like a control panel for your NAS or security system or such.

This serves to protect them technically (residential systems are not designed to withstand a large number of inbound requests), legally (you can't sue them for failing to serve your site) and of course to promote their more expensive business lines.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#283

Post by briffle »

paraditedc wrote: post #241

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 t…

Honestly, I would rather see it as a paid add-on to something like a synology or qnap..

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#284

Post by jethro_tell »

keehun wrote: post #53
gsreenivas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For the most advanced of users, would you opensource the server so that we can host our own gateway servers instead of relying on Helm? That would solve the "what happens if Helm goes down" question and "how do we trust Helm" question. Still wouldn't solve "how do I know my emails won't end up in spam" but at least we're getting closer (to at least what I would want to pay for.)

wouldn't that be postfix and a caldav server?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#285

Post by icebraining »

erinnh wrote: post #28
fyfy18 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necesarily banned, but very often port 25 will be blocked. Additionally it's pretty likely your email will be marked as spam if it comes from a residential IP. They must have thought about this though, so maybe they have their own SMTP servers that emails go through.

Apparently so: "Helm connects securely to a unique gateway, which is assigned a static IP address so Helm is reachable by other mail servers and secure TLS sessions can be established." Which I dont see the point of then. That way they are your gatekeeper of your mail/files etc. Not much of an improvement.

Agreed. I don't see how this is any different from a regular email server, with a local client that pulls emails over IMAP and deletes them remotely.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#286

Post by OJFord »

latentpot wrote: post #255
garry wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stolen? The data is secure - keys are stored in secure enclave, and storage is encrypted. Down? There's continuity of service if you have a 2nd box online, and it's as easy to restore from a live backup as an iPhone from iCloud. Email is the first app, and there will be more.

Why do I need to buy a physical box? Cant they give me a dedicated EC2 Micro instance instead? Solve the ISP issue, and the speed/ connectivity/ power etc?

It's easier to convince someone that it's securely 'theirs' with hardware than if it seems like just another cloud email service?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#287

Post by jethro_tell »

specialp wrote: post #271
CogitoCogito wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by blocking "wholesale"? I started hosting an email server in EC2 and the worst I've had is my emails going to a spam folder if that person hasn't received an email from my address yet (and never after they've marked me as not being spam). That happened surprisingly rarely and didn't feel like much worse than I would get by just sending people email from gmail with an address they don't know. I don't…

It depends on whom you send to. Like ironically I sent an abuse complaint to Verizon for a spammer and got rejected because they blocked all of Digital Ocean's IP space. Yahoo was particularly difficult too sending me a response saying they won't take my mail immediately on a single email to my brother. I had to go through a lot to get that fixed. Again this was due to being on cloud provider IP space. GMail is more…

Microsoft is the toughest one. Fortunately, I don't have friends that use outlook.com or w/e

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#288

Post by kakwa_ »

specialp wrote: post #102
dagi3d wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can send email using EC2 instances, including mass commercial campaigns (aka "legal spam"...).

However, there are a few things to do, more specifically, you must contact AWS to get "clean" IP ranges (fresh IPs, never allocated to instances), sign some agreements and pay additional fees.

It's not exactly as simple as an API call to create an ec2 instance, but it's doable.

With random IPs, there is a good chance indeed that it is already burnt by a previous allocation.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#289

Post by heartles »

graybolt wrote: post #281
specialp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are proxying the content with a VPN with a static IP on an EC2 instance you cannot police people sending out spam as you cannot see and meter the SMTP traffic. So does everyone get a dedicated instance and IP? If that is the case people are going to have issues getting their email accepted by almost all providers due to the IP being new and on a cloud provider block. If it is a subset of IPs that you create a…

I think this is the biggest problem. If there are a lot of bad actors, you drag down the whole system, but if you try to prevent bad actors you run into a lot of issues. A hard problem, and I don't envy anyone trying to solve it.

No offense, but given that you are making a product that has a much higher potential to enable bad actors than usual, isn't it kind of you/your company's job to try to solve it?

EDIT: Just realized I responded to the wrong person :(

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#290

Post by stevehawk »

monocasa wrote: post #227
stevehawk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US it's standard that residential accounts don't get to do that, but business accounts (which are usually double the price for the same speed but come with better/quicker support, particularly when physical lines are down, and an open connection) are allowed to run on-prem. And usually with a residential account you don't get a static IP as an option, but if you're lucky you can pay extra for one.

I tried to get a business account once at Comcast, and they wouldn't give me one that terminated at an apartment. : /

That's weird, I honestly wouldn't have expected that. They gave me a little resistance with one terminating at a home but ultimately they did it. They probably start to weigh the pros/cons (ie the money) of business level service to large residential buildings and decide it isn't worth it. Maybe too many variables once the line enters the building?
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