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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe the building part. But I've never had any issue - at three homes - with Comcast Business being run into my home garage.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#343

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…

> 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 an…

Gray area IMHO. Isn't Dropcam basically a server streaming video to my phone?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#345
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…

But you pay for this EC2 instance, and all traffic flows through it.

Honest question: What stops a malicious employee on your end sshing to this server and dumping plaintext messages from memory? What stops a court from ordering you to do that?

Even if you disable remote access, what stops someone from adding a new LaunchConfiguation that enables it silently on the next instance rotation in spite of whatever configuration is in place today?

At the end of the day it seems like you -can- spy on the traffic just as easily as you could if you were running the smtp services on an ec2 instance directly.

Given that, what is the value proposition here?

(Or if I am totally wrong, by all means call me out accordingly)

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#346
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…

I believe you will be more successful if you establish two things, first your own ASIN with a couple of class C IPV4 blocks and an IPV6 block.

Then you create an infrastructure for relaying the mail from your boxes to the Internet. Then you work with the various spam agencies to create both a way to respond to spam complaints and to detect and throttle or cut off spam senders. You'll find that spammers will offer to pay you a premium to "look the other way" but don't take it, many good companies died going down that road. Without the spammers it will be harder to make your numbers but concentrate on keeping your efficiency high and ultimately you will be better off.

You don't talk a lot about data protection on site for things like disk failure. What do you do in that regard to keep people from losing all of their mail if the disk goes tits up?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#347
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…

That EC2 instance is going to need whitelisting and constant vigilance that you're not sending commercial email or they'll block that port too. What prevents me from deploying a few hundred Helms to send spam?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#348

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…

Have a look at https://cloudron.io . They let you run apps on your own hardware - email being one of them

This looks interesting, but seems like their email server requires port 25, or some email relay (which is expected since everything is run locally).

Also, it is not clear how it works without a static IP from my ISP.

https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#349
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap, US ISPs are completely absurd. This definitely isn't a thing (or at least not enforced in any way) in Canada; most of my friends run on-prem web services out of their basements or closets.

Read your terms of service. The same section is definitely present for all Canadian ISPs as well.

"The residential Shaw Services are designed for personal Internet use. You may not use the residential Shaw Services for commercial purposes. You may not run a server in connection with the Shaw Services nor may you provide network services to others via the Shaw Services. Examples of prohibited servers and services include but are not limited to mail, http, ftp, irc, dhcp servers, and multi-user interactive forums. Some business services may be exempt from these limitations."

https://www.shaw.ca/uploadedFiles/Terms_of_Use/Acceptable_Us...

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#350
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…

I'm so glad to be living in Europe.

When it comes to consumer internet services, the US is a 3rd world country, which is kinda odd considering most of the western world does their business there.

I just checked the terms on my 300/300 fiber connection, as well as my (backup, company paid) 25/5 ADSL.

They're almost identical:

* no spamming. * no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uploads.

Besides that i can use it for whatever i like. They block port 25 though, and you can only get it opened by purchasing a commercial connection. It has a dynamic IP address that only changes when i reboot my modem, which happens once every 2 years or so, so practically static IP :)

The ADSL has all ports open and a staic IP.

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