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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#521

Post by snksnk »

wpietri wrote: post #27
keehun wrote: post #3

Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…

Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern. It has been a real struggle for me despite having a server I own in a rack with net-neighbors I know. Another big one for me is the failure modes. What do I do when my home connection is down? How about when my connection is down and I'm traveling? What happens when the hardware fails? How about when the hardware fails 5 years from n…

> Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern.

Perhaps relay the email out via your ISP account? I do that and it works well.

> Having email just down for a couple days while you wait for new hardware to would be a very bad experience.

Perhaps set up a fallback MX that directs traffic to e.g. a Mailfence account when your primary MX is down? Works for me. Also, mail servers can be cheap hardware (an old x220 will do).

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#522

Post by hannob »

keehun wrote: post #3

Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…

> 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft?

I run mail servers. I believe the idea that mail delivery is a problem for small mail providers is largely a myth. If you act somewhat reasonable (that is: if someone complains to you don't ignore it, don't send spam, check your logs for indications someone might put you on a blocklist) it's no big problem.

I think the myth comes largely from people who are actually spammers, but don't see themselves as that.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#523

Post by Jaruzel »

hannob wrote: post #522
keehun wrote: post #3

Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…

> 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? I run mail servers. I believe the idea that mail delivery is a problem for small mail providers is largely a myth. If you act somewhat reasonable (that is: if someone complains to you don't ignore it, don't send spam, check your logs for indications someone might put you on a blocklist) it's no…

I can't speak for outside the UK, but here the ISPs hand out non-static[1] IP addresses to residential customers. These IP ranges are in the spam-block lists that a lot of the other mail providers use. As such sending any email directly from your ISP given IP address is hit-and-miss affair. You don't even get any bounce notifications, the emails just disappear and never arrive at their destination, so you have no idea that something is wrong.

Some ISPs allow you to pay for a proper static IP to get around this problem, but again some of the ranges are still in the block lists. The only way I could guarantee that my IP wasn't blacklisted was to switch to a business account with my ISP and thus have IPs from a different range.

If you are stuck on a non-static IP, the easiest way around the problem is to send via the SMTP smarthost that your ISP hosts.

---

[1] They are technically dynamic IPs, but are sticky in that you keep the same IP unless your router goes offline for more than a couple of hours.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#524

Post by m3nu »

hannob wrote: post #522
keehun wrote: post #3

Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…

> 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? I run mail servers. I believe the idea that mail delivery is a problem for small mail providers is largely a myth. If you act somewhat reasonable (that is: if someone complains to you don't ignore it, don't send spam, check your logs for indications someone might put you on a blocklist) it's no…

Same experience. Mostly fine to run your own server. I check the blocklist status of the IP before moving/setting up a new server.

We end up on Hotmail/Outlook's blocklist about once a year. They remove it within 1-2 hours after opening a ticket.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#525

Post by leokennis »

amelius wrote: post #467
salimmadjd wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I funded this team because they're high integrity software engineers first, and we built this out of need I looked for the founders bio, a company contact info. There is nothing on their site. All I saw was a letter in the "About" section by the founder. You might have gotten to know these guys after various meetings and due diligence process. There is nothing on their website that sells me on trusting them or the…

How would material on a website provide trust, without a means to verify that information?

What other way is there? Have a button to “let the CEO call me and pinky promise me that the website info is truthful, complete and correct”? Would you believe it then?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#526

Post by TheGrumpyBrit »

ryan-c wrote: post #304
forapurpose wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helm has no obligation or business need to log any metadata The point of Helm is to provide privacy (and end-user control) through technical means, if I understand correctly. If it's just a matter of trusting motives, I don't need a home server.

I disagree. Seizing data stored on a server in your house is much, much more difficult that seizing data stored on a cloud server.

Not really. If you are under investigation, seizing your server is as simple as a search warrant. The challenge is accessing the data - if you've encrypted it well, it's impossible to access. However, on your own server, you may get complacent and allow some data leakage.

Major providers like Gmail and ICloud will have a longer and more convoluted process to provide your data to state actors, but analysing that data is going to be far easier since it will come in a standard format.

If your goal is to make your data difficult to seize, a better option is probably to self-host on either a cheap VPS or a corporate-grade cloud service. That keeps the data out of reach of a warrant on your home, and keeps it unreadable after they've actually jumped through the hoops to seize it from your provider.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#527

Post by TheGrumpyBrit »

hannob wrote: post #522
keehun wrote: post #3

Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…

> 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? I run mail servers. I believe the idea that mail delivery is a problem for small mail providers is largely a myth. If you act somewhat reasonable (that is: if someone complains to you don't ignore it, don't send spam, check your logs for indications someone might put you on a blocklist) it's no…

Running your own mailserver is easy enough if you have an IP that isn't blacklisted. Most residential IP's will be on the Spamhaus PBL which will cause issues. You can run a mailserver on a $5/month VPS without issue as long as you have a dedicated IP and you check for blacklist entries before you start.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#528

Post by tknot »

There are of course alternatives that are completely open https://www.kinguardproject.org/

Not sure about the Helm but i havn't found any source code nor any description on which open source components they use. But i for one would not trust my personal information to a closed box.

Disclaimer, i'm engaged in the Kinguard project.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#529

Post by Fnoord »

pmontra wrote: post #519
vonseel wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Proof of Work basically was invented to cope with email spam. That's more or less a stamp. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

If you have a KvK in The Netherlands your PII details are public, and you will start receiving physical spam from companies despite such spam not being free to send. I never receive spam from individuals though; only companies.

On top of that, the costs of electricity are not the same everywhere (they are very expensive in The Netherlands, for example, than in the USA, and China is very cheap). Nor is it widely stable available everywhere (examples include India and Africa). Proof of Work is basically a waste of energy as well.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#530

Post by oliverx0 »

ryan-c wrote: post #233
zrail wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You know what would be a better product? A relay SMTP server that works with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Fastmail et. al. to pump e-mail from personal servers and ensures it won't get caught in spam filters." That's basically Sendgrid or Mailgun or even Fastmail itself. They can all relay SMTP for arbitrary domains.

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.

How about https://postmarkapp.com/ ? It is more tailored to "transactional emails", but seems pretty close to what you describe
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