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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#411

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

cwyers wrote: post #276
morley wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you're so upset about this. If you don't think the product is a good value for your time and money, that's fine: don't purchase it. I think Helm comes with some obvious trade-offs, but the product looks nice and I think (judging from other HN comments) there's a market for it. I don't know if it's a large market for this to be a success, but it seems interesting at least, and at first blush the…

Because it bothers me when someone sells a "secure" product where the security measures are unrelated to the threat model. The Helm server is connected to the open Internet, which means that physical possession of the Helm server is not the only or even main thing necessary to secure it from compromise. Because of how it works, the server still has a dependency on cloud providers -- you need cloud backups and the pub…

How would you realistically completely remove the need for the relay server while still allowing the customer to run the server on a typical home internet connection?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#412

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

sjs382 wrote: post #203
garry wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a valuable and useful criticism and we're going to talk about this at our next board meeting. How do you know who to trust? You surely have to trust someone. It feels generally true that we can trust Apple since we pay them for hardware and their ongoing business interest is in protecting their revenue streams through their hardware and iOS app store, which means you are aligned. Generally for Helm that's a g…

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.

How could it NOT be a hardware play? Then how else can you verify and trust that you know what code is running in some datacenter in who knows where?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#413

Post by sandworm101 »

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.

Canada. 100$/month for 150down/12 up residential. Never seen more than 50 down. Regular outages (for 30min every few days). If the US is third-world in terms of service, canada is an uncontacted amazon tribe.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#414

Post by freeopinion »

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…

To be pedantic, when you provide content to Facebook, you are serving them data, right? When you upload pictures to Dropbox, you are serving, right? Slingbox? Security webcam? Facetime?

I don't think there is a good enough definition of "server" or "serving" for such restrictions to be enforceable except is an arbitrary way.

I have an MUA that retrieves email from a server and sends email to a server. It might run in a browser and interact with GMail. It might be a mobile app or Thunderbird or Outlook. It might be sendmail or postfix or Exchange. Which of these are "servers"? Which are banned and which are ok?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#416

Post by newman314 »

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…

What VPN solution are you using? Wireguard or something else?

Do you have a plan to help make email security features easy to consume: SPF, DMARC, MTA-STS etc.?

Is there a way to opt out on the information that is collected?

I looked on your site but it does not show a logical architecture which might be useful for some of us.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#417

Post by wmf »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #412
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.

How could it NOT be a hardware play? Then how else can you verify and trust that you know what code is running in some datacenter in who knows where?

https://cloud.google.com/shielded-vm/ ?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#419

Post by dice »

ktamura wrote: post #418

I have to point out that while their marketing copy claims that they want to know "as little as possible" about their customers, they have Segment's JavaScript tag on thehelm.com Do you know what Segment does? It makes it easy to send data anywhere -> https://segment.com/catalog

The site is also completely unsuable without JS enabled.

Apps market? Piwik (tracking)? Why would I allow these?

https://i.imgur.com/OFWYnWy.png

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#420

Post by aidenn0 »

tyre wrote: post #308
ryan-c wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rate-limiting would be interesting. If the cost of the service was specifically high enough to be unscalable. Like, $10 per month and you can send 200 emails per day. That’s expensive compared to anything else but fine for personal use.

fastmail already is available for $10 per month, so I guess problem solved?
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