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Helm: Personal Email Server

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#401

Post by jethro_tell »

dsigurds wrote: post #388
graybolt wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi graybolt, I'm Dirk, co-founder and CTO at Helm. Each Helm Personal Server is assigned their own IP address. We make sure to only use IP addresses that haven't been put on blacklists. If people abuse the service by sending spam it will only affect the reputation of their assigned IP and won't cause harm to the reputation of other Helms.

How do you plan to protect users from themselves? I.e. 2 charater passwords.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#402

Post by wil421 »

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…

The telcos only enforce the server rule if you are causing problems like doing something illegal, torrenting, or maxing out your bandwidth 24/7. I’ve had multiple servers running over the years and never had any issues with Comcast or AT&T.

Generally they don’t care if it’s for personal use. I’ve heard of them shutting people down for something they saw as business related. They didn’t really get shut down, it was more like a friendly “We see what you’re doing and a business plan would allow you to do it for $30 more a month”.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#403

Post by jedieaston »

i2shar wrote: post #391
lrvick wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Although, if they have to route stuff through EC2 instances anyway, I could just start jedieaston's homegrown EC2 email service, let customers pay me $100 a year to get them a domain name and spin up a email server in a EC2 instance and give them a login, then they don't have to have a box at their house which is liable to ISP and power outages. And you get the same amount of privacy that you get with this box (so about as much as you trust Amazon).

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#404

Post by wil421 »

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.

Seems like a similar price I saw on AT&T FTTP plans and Comcast’s cable internet plans for 100mbit.

Static IP might cost extra.

I pay AT&T $80 a month for symmetrical 1Gb FTTP with no data cap.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#405

Post by lowry »

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…

I would first try using port 587 and only afterwards route through Amazon or something.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#406

Post by znpy »

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.

Italy (Milan): 1Gbps/200Mbps FTTH. About 30€/month.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#407

Post by jedieaston »

jethro_tell wrote: post #287
specialp wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does your email get blocked if it is sent to a business on O365?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#408

Post by [deleted] »

garry wrote: post #237
rntz wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#409

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

the_common_man wrote: post #334
OJFord wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But then they spend a lot of time being a hardware company, no?

So? It's a necessity of establishing trust with the customers.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#410

Post by wink »

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.

I just checked, it's not available :P

From my experience, at least in Munich it's hit or miss which of the 2 cable company services your building - it's not even on the street level.

Also I'm not really complaining. Say what you will about Deutsche Telekom, but I've been a happy customer since 1998. Everytime I had a different ISP (mainly M-Net) I had more problems than uptime. This is more expensive, but I'm having less than one noticeable downtime every 2 years...

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