It's a little odd that the whole premise is own your data and then when you go to order and there's a recurring subscription fee that you can't opt out of
Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
51–60 of 226 posts
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#52A raspberry pi 4 can do everything this machine does.
Actually no. There is no support for secure boot or proper encrypted storage with a protected key.
We prototyped on Pis a while back before we shipped our v1 but there are meaningful limitations.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#53Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.
Hi there - co-founder/CEO of Helm here. We don't make the subscription optional at this time because the overwhelming majority of people on the Internet do not have a static IP address with a corresponding PTR record, which is required if you want to have deliverable email. There are other ways to handle domain registration, DNS and backups on your own, but we believe the subscription is a pretty great value for the…
How do you manage the spam reputation of the IP addresses you use for mail delivery when some of your customers may be sending spam?
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems that Nextcloud, Postfix, and Strongswan are copyleft. > You may obtain the complete corresponding source code from us for a period of three years after our last shipment of this product by sending a money order or check for $5 to: Without being illegal this is rather hostile. But then again they are selling subscriptions to open-source software so I expected something shady.
See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an onli…
> Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an online accessible version of it.
While true, this is misleading - if distributing under the "Written offer" term (rather than including the source code alongside the binaries), everyone has a right to receive a copy of the source.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#55Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.
Hi there - co-founder/CEO of Helm here. We don't make the subscription optional at this time because the overwhelming majority of people on the Internet do not have a static IP address with a corresponding PTR record, which is required if you want to have deliverable email. There are other ways to handle domain registration, DNS and backups on your own, but we believe the subscription is a pretty great value for the…
I love your idea and execution. But requiring yearly subscription is defeating the purpose of "Break away from big tech" as I am now tied to your company instead of big tech. What's the point in this?
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#56According to their blog post How Helm Works - Part 1: Networking [0], on the AWS side of things, for each Helm unit, they are provisioning an EC2 instance, an Elastic IP, and a Route 53 config. I suppose the 128GB backup is also part of this. From my perspective, $99/yr is not a bad deal for all this to be automatically managed. [0] https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networki...
So you're tied to an EC2 instance? That seems like an unnecessary centralization point.
yep. It serves to justify the subscription though, which is what all businesses want. Ongoing money vs a one-time purchase.
I personally quite like the idea of an appliance for email. But adding a permanent subscription that not only costs a lot of money, but will stop working if the company has an outage or goes out of business means it isn't targetted at me.
If you require AWS and have offsite backups then the product isn't an 'own your own data' product as it's advertised. At that point, why not just pay for managed email. It's cheaper, and probably easier to migrate if there are problems.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi there - co-founder/CEO of Helm here. We don't make the subscription optional at this time because the overwhelming majority of people on the Internet do not have a static IP address with a corresponding PTR record, which is required if you want to have deliverable email. There are other ways to handle domain registration, DNS and backups on your own, but we believe the subscription is a pretty great value for the…
How do you manage the spam reputation of the IP addresses you use for mail delivery when some of your customers may be sending spam?
We have relationships with key ESPs and email security providers to help with managing reputation/deliverability issues.
There are much cheaper ways to send spam effectively than using a Helm so we haven't seen real issues around this.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi there - co-founder/CEO of Helm here. We don't make the subscription optional at this time because the overwhelming majority of people on the Internet do not have a static IP address with a corresponding PTR record, which is required if you want to have deliverable email. There are other ways to handle domain registration, DNS and backups on your own, but we believe the subscription is a pretty great value for the…
I love your idea and execution. But requiring yearly subscription is defeating the purpose of "Break away from big tech" as I am now tied to your company instead of big tech. What's the point in this?
You can see elsewhere where I discuss what the subscription provides. I think there's a huge difference between subscribing to companies that share customer values around privacy and security vs being at the mercy of companies looking to extract as much value from your data as possible.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#59This should be encouraged and supported. While I do have many questions, which would definitely delay an impulse buy, it is of general interest to have more companies trying to create easy to use products that help people to cut the cord with 5 companies that rules our digital lives today. Now on with the questions I'd love to clarify: - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware? - Can we…
I have one and really like it!
1. Like most things you have to trust the company producing everything. The closest thing I have seen to auditable hardware is Bunnie's Precursor.
2. You cannot install your own applications right now. And the updates happen automatically.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#60I care about owning my own data very much. This makes me conservative when it comes to these solutions, despite otherwise being an early adopter of everything tech. For that reason I always recommend Synology NAS machines. They have been around forever, they work for years on autopilot and feel very similar to a microwave in terms of operational overhead. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. But most importantly, the…
Synology boxes phone home, to Chinese IP space no less.
Is the phone home to Taiwanese IP space, or mainland China IP space?