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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#391

Post by i2shar »

lrvick wrote: post #345
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…

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 configur…

In all honesty, couldn't this be a question to Amazon for anything that ever runs on any EC2 instance? What makes you not distrust any cloud vendor when they manage every bit of your information including keys.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#392

Post by woodrowbarlow »

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…

if your company folds and the cloud service goes offline, does that render my helm useless? that wouldn't make me feel like i "own [my] email".

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#393

Post by 8fingerlouie »

writepub wrote: post #368
8fingerlouie wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/uplo…

> They block port 25 though They don't explicitly disallow it in their TOS, they just make it impossible by disabling the underlying tech. And this > no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uploads "unethical" behavior is the most arbitrary, un-objective clause one can ever have. Your ISP may find your hosting an email server "unethical", and this clause allows them to ban you. Europe…

unethical behavior is my (bad) translation. The original Danish wording is restricted to hate speech.

They also specifically disallow distribution/downloading of child pornography and leaks like "fappening", which i translated to "illegal downloads/uploads".

The list of things that are disallowed is very specifically worded in Danish, as legalese usually is. Furthermore it is also customary in Denmark to allow all traffic. in or outbound.

All "metadata" is logged for 5 years, mandated by law, so every IP i connect to is there along with port, duration, protocol (if available).

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#395

Post by wmf »

garry wrote: post #239
sjs382 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, we're in agreement that this sort of thing should 1) be paid for, 2) not readable by the provider, and 3) maintenance-free for the user. I still don't understand why this is a hardware play. There are advantages to owning the hardware but none of those advantages seem to apply here. The hardware feels like a bit of an albatross.

If you want to truly control your data, you've got to control your hardware too. See: Lavabit.

But going all the way to the end of that tradeoff is so expensive. It seems like a Helm VM would be 90% as secure and also 90% cheaper.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#396

Post by ktpsns »

wink wrote: post #373
8fingerlouie wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/uplo…

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. Germany's third biggest city, I can only get 50/10 Mbit, maybe 100/20 - no fiber in sight. No static IP and no guarantees anyone will accept mail from this dialup subnet. /s

In Germany, with Unitymedia Buisness, I get symmetric 100Mbit/sec over coax (even in mid-size cities), a static IPv4 adresse and excellent customer service. Price tag: 35EUR/month.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#397

Post by CodeWriter23 »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #175
specialp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Deliverability is a moving target, so you can’t really rely on your delivery metrics from last week.

Why? The SPAM Scoring Industry is a kind of monoculture that will impede or cancel delivery of messages. Most big email providers outsource SPAM scoring to a third party like Symantec or Brightworks. And when your email is found offensive by Brightworks with one of their clients, you’re banned on all of their clients. Part of how SPAM scorers gather intel us by hooking into the CFL system so they get a notification when a user hits the junk button to delete an email. Another way is by checking for mass duplication in your emails. Another way is tracking open rates via the email provider’s UI sending metrics to the scorer’s APIs.

And then there’s the CIDR block lists they coordinate and distribute as a courtesy for their customers. So you might be able to deliver to @gmail.com and then @yahoo.com won’t even take a connection from your server’s IP.

Why does all this happen? According to my friend who works for a midrange ISP on their email service, they have about 120PB to store real email. And the amount of SPAM they reject outright (never reaches any box, not even the junk box) is 93% of all their email traffic. They simply can’t afford to store all the SPAM.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#398

Post by ChuckMcM »

le-mark wrote: post #385
ChuckMcM wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

and to detect and throttle or cut off spam senders Isn't throttling outbound email count/day from the start the only real solution?

In my experience you can't know what is 'normal' until you have seen it, so fixing the rate at the start would be unduly onerous.

People have lives which can sometimes look spammy, like you are made the coordinator of the school potluck and suddenly you're sending email to 150 parents asking them to volunteer to bring food. But after that event you go back to your regular rate.

Because this isn't a "PC" in the sense that it is more difficult to be overtaken by a virus and start sending spam without your knowledge, and as a mail service provider you know that email originating from the device has to come from a specific domain, you have a lot more tools to detect that someone is being a bad actor or not.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#399

Post by jethro_tell »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #350
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…

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/uplo…

This is no different than the US. No one has 25 open, and the server clause is only enforced if you try to do something in the 'unethical behavior/illigal file transfer' department. But in America, a 35$ internet connection needs a leagal contract to help mitigate the lawsuits and grey areas.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#400

Post by jethro_tell »

ktpsns wrote: post #396
wink wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. Germany's third biggest city, I can only get 50/10 Mbit, maybe 100/20 - no fiber in sight. No static IP and no guarantees anyone will accept mail from this dialup subnet. /s

In Germany, with Unitymedia Buisness, I get symmetric 100Mbit/sec over coax (even in mid-size cities), a static IPv4 adresse and excellent customer service. Price tag: 35EUR/month.

In US, I have access to the same plan at same price point. But I have a semetric 1000Mbps for 85 USD. I can get a static IP but I see no need with DNS. Not sure how the customer service is, I haven't called in 2.5 years that I've had the link.
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