301–310 of 592 posts
Wait, how does this hardware stacking work? Anyone have photos of the actual product? This all looks rendered.
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You say Helm solves or will solve all these problems. But if I don't actually need to be able to reach the box in order to use my email - if it will work even when the box is offline, powered-down, stolen, or destroyed - then what, exactly, is the point of the $500 box itself? It's not privacy, it seems. If it were private, how could it work when the box is offline? I'm not opposed to a "pay for your email instead of…
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.
For $1000 I get 2 boxes I can't use for anything else right now (and still not very reliable inside my home), whereas with Fastmail (for example) I can get an email service for 20 years @ $50/yr that is very reliable. I'm not sure of the value proposition for this thing.
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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 :(
The person you are replying too isn't the CEO. Just another new user (that's why the username is in green).
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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.
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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…
It's interesting that Amazon is portrayed as the "massive corporate server" provider that stores your email "outside your home" on your homepage, yet you use AWS EC2 instances to pipe email traffic to/from Helm. I understand that it's just an encrypted VPN connection, and are not actually storing email on the EC2 instances. But is there any way for your customers to ensure that? Can your customers shell into the Helm…
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…
The 2015 Order said this, "A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management."
I would argue that banning personal email servers or personal servers at all is not reasonable network management (e.g. a nest thermometer or a smart microwave or an Alexa/Siri thing is a server), and if we're looking to explore home appliances that decentralize the web, we need to ensure that broadband providers' policies don't block them. Google Fiber screwed this up too.
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If your ISP doesn't let you run your own mail server, they're not an ISP.
Sure. But good luck getting your mail accepted by other mail servers, coming from a broadband IP address.
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"You know what would be a better product? A relay SMTP server that works with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Fastmail et. al. to pump e-mail from personal servers and ensures it won't get caught in spam filters." That's basically Sendgrid or Mailgun or even Fastmail itself. They can all relay SMTP for arbitrary domains.
It's actually a totally different product vs Sendgrid/Mailgun/etc. Such a product would need to have a ToS that states it can only be used for low volume personal and business correspondence, and have per-account rate limiting to enforce that. Doing it this way is necessary to avoid having mail treated as bulk. I've tried relaying through mailgun to get mail to outlook.com, it does not work.
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…
Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…
Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern. It has been a real struggle for me despite having a server I own in a rack with net-neighbors I know. Another big one for me is the failure modes. What do I do when my home connection is down? How about when my connection is down and I'm traveling? What happens when the hardware fails? How about when the hardware fails 5 years from n…
This is the big obstacle preventing me (and I assume others) from moving away from cloud. Cloud services just work, everywhere, all the time (effectively). I'd love to get the privacy benefits of bringing my data "in-house" but I'm not sure I want to take on the equivalent of a part-time sysadmin job.