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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#501

Post by mrgalaxy »

gsreenivas wrote: post #51
stevehawk wrote: post #36

I feel like I'm the target market for this as I pay for Fastmail .. 1 - how many domains can I use? I currently use ~6 with my Fastmail account 2 - can I have multiple users? I recognize that fastmail doesn't let me but at this price point I would want it. It looks like you support that but I'm unsure. 3 - How do you convince my ISP to let me receive traffic on the ports required to run a mail server? (most firewall…

hey stevehawk - thanks for your questions. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Helm. Let me take them one by one: 1 - how many domains can I use? Each Helm Personal Server currently supports 1 domain 2 - Can I have multiple users? Yes, we have no limits on the number of users. 3 - Please see my response above about how we navigate around ISPs blocking ports. We route traffic through an EC2 instance with an iptables configu…

Hi gsreenivas,

I hope you end up seeing this.

I feel like am your target user for this product. I want to be able to isolate the majority of my data away from these large corporations (namely Google), email is probably the hardest one for me to do myself. I really want to use your product.

BUT, and this is a HUGE but, I am a web developer and I have like 15 domain names. Some from old businesses, some for just random stuff. I accept email from all of them and have online accounts tied to many of them. In order for me to use this product, I absolutely need to bring ALL my domain names with me.

In fact, the number of supported domain names is the primary feature I look at when comparing email providers. If it doesn't support the amount that I have, I immediately disregard it, doesn't matter what else they be offering.

So please reconsider the number of domain names. I imagine there are lots of users like me.

Best of luck to you and your team!

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#504

Post by broodbucket »

jethro_tell wrote: post #401
dsigurds wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're spending $500 on something to help keep your stuff private and secure, you're probably not a 2 character password kind of guy.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#505

Post by vonseel »

aidenn0 wrote: post #420
tyre wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pretty soon email will require stamps, like paper mail. I wonder if they will sell forever stamps?

Jk, I just thought it was funny that we pay for services which were always seen as a free alternative to paper mail and stamps were a thing of the past.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#506

Post by Sophistifunk »

I want nothing to do with the shit-sandwich that is hosting mail, and have utmost respect for those of you that can.

But I would love a small server box that can be simply stacked to increase capacity for home labs and desktop k8s clusters without having to buy and configure a switch and complicated power delivery.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#507

Post by cannonedhamster »

bigiain wrote: post #459
briffle wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I would rather see it as a paid add-on to something like a synology or qnap..

To be fair - building a business like Helm while needing to deal with other people's hardware and their software updates which you wouldn't find out broke your product until your customers start screaming about their email not working - wouldn't be fun. I could easily see how someone could want to do that and seriously consider it, then discard it as an option (or at least as part of their MVP launch options).

So make a supported hardware list,docker container, etc. The hardware is interesting, but the types of people who would buy this either already have racks in their houses and just want someone else to manage their stuff, or want to manage their own hardware because they want to make sure they have their own hardware components locked down. It's a neat project to be sure, and it's not terribly expensive for the hardware, but the real money maker is the ongoing support and security for the service, which is functionally really similar to a cloud service without a lot of the benefits.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#508

Post by jethro_tell »

broodbucket wrote: post #504
jethro_tell wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you're spending $500 on something to help keep your stuff private and secure, you're probably not a 2 character password kind of guy.

Oh boy, I know people with a fiber drop, 25tb raids with baby server farms and single character password. I think you highly underestimate the lazyness and/or stupidity of people. That doesn't even cover fishing.

Secondly, I think you underestimate the time intensive work that goes into clearing up an IP. I've run mail servers with users in the thousands. It's basically a full time job to keep a single ip clean. And that's with a half or less percentage of clueless users. I'm unsure how this will scale to hundreds of IPs let alone the thousands(x100) that would probably be needed to make creating your own hardware profitable.

Third, you're going to need to reach incompetent customers to make this profitable.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#509

Post by WA9ACE »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #506

I want nothing to do with the shit-sandwich that is hosting mail, and have utmost respect for those of you that can. But I would love a small server box that can be simply stacked to increase capacity for home labs and desktop k8s clusters without having to buy and configure a switch and complicated power delivery.

I'm not sure if this fits your use case, but it's what I plan on ordering soon https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/#buyawesomefreenasmin...

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#510

Post by dang »

jhabdas wrote: post #295

If your were real men you'd give it away for free and find a way to monetize your audience through a a value proposition that exceeds what it seems you've done. Cute marketing site but that's kinda lame yo.

Your comments have repeatedly been breaking the HN guidelines. Would you please not do that? We ban accounts that won't stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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