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Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#81

Post by smitop »

wcerfgba wrote: post #67

From [1]: > Does Helm have access to my emails? > The architecture of the system has been designed so that it's not possible for Helm to access your emails. Email senders now support sending emails over an encrypted SSL/TLS channel where the email is only decrypted once it reaches your personal email server. Helm is not able to decode these emails because we don't have access to the encryption key. In the limited sit…

I don't know how this is actually implemented, but it would be possible to do this as described if the static IP provided by Helm just proxied all incoming packets directly to the personal server, without acting as a relay server at the SMTP protocol level but instead just being a dumb proxy. There's no reason that Helm would need to act as a mail hop at the SMTP layer or do TLS termination anyways.

The reason that the using the server's actual IP wouldn't work is that most residential IP ranges are responsible for mostly spam (so most outgoing email would likely be filtered), and some ISPs don't assign static IPv4 addresses to residential users (IPv6 would fix the later issue, but mass IPv6 adoption isn't going to happen for a while).

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#82

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

gsreenivas wrote: post #46
satyanash wrote: post #3

Dockerized 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…

Is the subscription mandatory. What about the minority of users who do have a static IP address. Should all users be given an option to arrange their own static IP address as well as to subscribe to a pre-packaged deal. They might be able to get a better price than $99/yr, or better terms. Whats to lose by having options.

These are honest questions because I have often thought about a similar project where a static IP is required and wondered if and how it could support itself.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#83

Post by davidzweig »

giantg2 wrote: post #74

Seems pretty cool. A little pricey and maybe even overpowered. The biggest thing that holds me back from hosting my own server is probably lack of static IP and the time/cognitive overhead of maintenance/security.

For IP, you can get a domain adress from namecheap then set up dynamic DNS (https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...). Maintenance/security.. log in from time to time and run 'apt update && apt upgrade' ?

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#84

Post by gsreenivas »

Saris wrote: post #75
gsreenivas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there - Helm co-founder/CEO here. We will have additional tiers of subscription for customers to back up additional data with us. Everything is locally compressed before uploading and all backups are encrypted with keys only customers have.

Is it not on the site maybe? So far I haven't been able to find anything but the 128GB option.

We haven't launched these tiers yet - that's why

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#85

Post by gsreenivas »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #82
gsreenivas wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

Is the subscription mandatory. What about the minority of users who do have a static IP address. Should all users be given an option to arrange their own static IP address as well as to subscribe to a pre-packaged deal. They might be able to get a better price than $99/yr, or better terms. Whats to lose by having options. These are honest questions because I have often thought about a similar project where a static I…

We might consider adding support in the future - we're not philosophically against it, but it is more work to develop and support.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#86

Post by gsreenivas »

davidzweig wrote: post #83
giantg2 wrote: post #74

Seems pretty cool. A little pricey and maybe even overpowered. The biggest thing that holds me back from hosting my own server is probably lack of static IP and the time/cognitive overhead of maintenance/security.

For IP, you can get a domain adress from namecheap then set up dynamic DNS ( https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx... ). Maintenance/security.. log in from time to time and run 'apt update && apt upgrade' ?

residential IP addresses are generally blacklisted by email services

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#87

Post by Causality1 »

xvector wrote: post #41
allset_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The required subscription also means it's useless if they go out of business.

That's one of the biggest problems with subscription services. My favorite band's album was pulled from Spotify. Wouldn't have been a concern if I had set up Lidarr on my NAS.

Streaming is great for music discovery but storage is cheap enough I keep all my favorite music on my phone.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#88

Post by thesausageking »

gsreenivas wrote: post #46
satyanash wrote: post #3

Dockerized 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 much revenue, if any, do you give back to the Nextcloud project?

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#89

Post by smitop »

mjg59 wrote: post #54
codetrotter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They put a offer to distribute the source code on their legal page: https://orders.thehelm.com/pages/legal#open-source: "You may request a copy of the source by e-mailing: support@thehelm.com with "Source for Helm Personal Server" in the subject line. This offer is valid to anyone in receipt of this information". I emailed asking to plz gimme teh codez, let's see what I get!

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#90

Post by Causality1 »

I like it, but I can't help the feeling this is going to go the way of 90% of modern products: either goes broke in five years and shuts down or becomes successful and in five years gets bought by Google and shut down to force customers onto their new "Nest Server" service.
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