Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 592 posts

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#431

Post by Anthony-G »

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

Also, no actual content appears on the page without allowing third-party JavaScript. Even though I'm interested in hearing about new mail services, I chose to close the tab rather than spend time figuring out which of the 17 third-party domains I should white-list in order to see some text.

I doubt I'm the only one who made this choice. For some of us, content is still the reason we use a web browser; that includes those of us who value privacy and minimising the amount of arbitrary code we run on our devices.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#432

Post by pathseeker »

freeopinion wrote: post #414
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…

Usually an ISP defines it as something that allows ingress unsolicited connections. i.e. put a stateful firewall in front of it and if it requires ingress allow rules to function, it's a server.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#433

Post by lolc »

Tepix wrote: post #217

If you feel like doing this yourself, get something like a Raspberry Pi 3 (or better, like the Asus Tinker Board) and use sovereign (from github) to automatically install your own mail server/owncloud on it. Then get a dirt cheap VPS (less than $15/yr) from lowendbox/lowendtalk and run a OpenVPN tunnel. So what's the advantage of having this at home instead of an ISP? For one, backup and restore is fast and easy. You…

Unfortunately reputation management is a requirement nowadays for all senders of MTA. And it's an ongoing hassle.

Helm promises to handle this in a way that doesn't let them read transmitted mails. You still have to trust them ultimately, but the stakes are higher.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#434

Post by pathseeker »

dev_dull wrote: post #351
__david__ wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the normal customer service do that? And is it $50 a month or a one time fee? Were you able to unlock outgoing port 25? (Fellow AT&T user here)

It’s a $50 one time fee. You need to call their “premium” service. Not sure if they do it per port or what, but I asked them to open all my ports and verified 25 is accessible (123 udp inbound still blocked for unexplained reasons). They’re still clueless. I tried to explain that it’s being blocked by AT&T and not my router but eventually I just gave up. Their process involves a logmein session where they take contro…

>123 udp inbound still blocked for unexplained reasons

NTP was part of a massive DRDoS not too long ago. It's possible they pruned it somewhere much further up the network under the (not insane) assumption that most customers don't need to run their own time servers that answer public queries.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#435

Post by mayli »

Tharkun wrote: post #16
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…

If your ISP doesn't let you run your own mail server, they're not an ISP.

Comcast doesn't let me run my own mail server, but I think Comcast is still an ISP.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#436

Post by lvh »

lolc wrote: post #421
lvh wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on: are you suggesting cloud e-mail services don't use FDE?

They may but they also hold the keys.

I mean, sure? You can use encryption to get security and privacy features but "FDE" isn't it. FDE is more important for Helm but that's a problem of their own design: suddenly the e-mail is in a box in my kitchen and it's a lot easier to walk out with a box in my kitchen than it is to walk out with a drive from us-east-2a :-) For anything in the cloud it's a belt-and-suspenders/compliance thing.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#437

Post by lvh »

lolc wrote: post #433
Tepix wrote: post #217

If you feel like doing this yourself, get something like a Raspberry Pi 3 (or better, like the Asus Tinker Board) and use sovereign (from github) to automatically install your own mail server/owncloud on it. Then get a dirt cheap VPS (less than $15/yr) from lowendbox/lowendtalk and run a OpenVPN tunnel. So what's the advantage of having this at home instead of an ISP? For one, backup and restore is fast and easy. You…

Unfortunately reputation management is a requirement nowadays for all senders of MTA. And it's an ongoing hassle. Helm promises to handle this in a way that doesn't let them read transmitted mails. You still have to trust them ultimately, but the stakes are higher.

The only Helm EC2 instance I've seen listens on 587 and 993, which seems incongruent with that promise.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#438

Post by throwanem »

heartles wrote: post #289
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.

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 :(

Spammers can already get mail servers without a problem. This doesn’t make that easier, because it’s already as easy as it can be.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#439

Post by drb91 »

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…

Just another reminder, terms of service are bullshit. Most people here likely violate the terms by using ngrok.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#440

Post by specialp »

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.

Yeah that isn't sufficient. Most people are going to get their email rejected or spam filtered from many sources. Having an IP that is not blacklisted is not sufficient to have it have enough reputation to be accepted by large providers.
Post reply on HN