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Helm: Personal Email Server

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#101

Post by joshstrange »

andr wrote: post #65

I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center. - You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too. - Disk failure may lose all your data. - Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it. - You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the…

This was my first thought as well. My email IS very important to me which is exactly why I will never host it locally. The only content I host locally-only is stuff I would be annoyed to lose but could replace, the only content I host locally with online backup is stuff I can do without for a couple of days while I recover. Email falls into neither of those categories, I need it to be up all the time. I have considered fastmail or similar but I will never trust my home connection.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#102

Post by specialp »

dagi3d wrote: post #60
gsreenivas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey jawns, great question. I'm Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm. To answer your question, ISPs block port 25 and email service providers typically reject emails coming from residential IP blocks. To build a plug and play solution, we knew that our server could not require listening for inbound connections on a residential internet connection. So we set about looking into how we could route traffic to and fr…

I thought that sending email from EC2 instance was not allowed and only option was using their SES service.

You can send email from an EC2 instance but good luck getting anyone to accept it. A lot of email providers block EC2 wholesale, or if they do accept it you are going to have to have a long standing reputation.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#103

Post by j45 »

andr wrote: post #65

I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center. - You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too. - Disk failure may lose all your data. - Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it. - You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the…

The cloud ultimately is someone else's computer, abstracted away to feel good. Data loss occurs in the cloud too and it sucks.

It's also dangerous to say because you don't understand or see the value in something, that there possibly can't be any.

Today's home connectivity + LTE fail over is reasonable to rely on. One could put a vps proxy in front of it if you really wanted.

Running a home appliance is not out of the question or unreasonable. I have a Mac mini server that is coming on 8 years of age and zero issues.

Today, the combination of Ubuntu, docker, and ready to go setups make it super easy. Offsite backups are not an issue anymore. Running owncloud is good for files locally, but email is worth it in some cases.

We own a lot of appliances at home that have a lifecycle to maintain already.

The reality is the above issues have a much lower chance of happening than 10-15 years ago.

Hardware is far more reliable and than it was, my 15 year old servers pulled from my data center were still working when I virtualized.

A discovery I made was owning a PDU (like an APC Masterswitch) cleans the electricity so much enough that attached equipment don't seem to fail. I ran my own email server in a datacentre for clients for a long time because it was the norm.

With Home Automation adoption increasing I suspect a home appliance of some kind will become a reality anyways. If personal data became a feature of it, that would be useful.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#104

Post by rovr138 »

stevehawk wrote: post #40
_verandaguy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap, US ISPs are completely absurd. This definitely isn't a thing (or at least not enforced in any way) in Canada; most of my friends run on-prem web services out of their basements or closets.

In the US it's standard that residential accounts don't get to do that, but business accounts (which are usually double the price for the same speed but come with better/quicker support, particularly when physical lines are down, and an open connection) are allowed to run on-prem. And usually with a residential account you don't get a static IP as an option, but if you're lucky you can pay extra for one.

> And usually with a residential account you don't get a static IP as an option, but if you're lucky you can pay extra for one.

I use a VPS as a proxy. SSH with AutoSSH. I use a VPS ($15/yr), map the ports from the VPS to the server at home.

For example, when you hit 80/443 on the VPS, it's routed to a reverse proxy in the apartment, then to the correct service.

Not a bad setup.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#105

Post by garry »

andr wrote: post #65

I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center. - You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too. - Disk failure may lose all your data. - Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it. - You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the…

I'm the first and biggest investor in Helm and I'm on the board. I created email-based Posterous previously (YC funded) and was a YC partner for 5 years. I funded this team because they're high integrity software engineers first, and we built this out of need— a company like this needs to exist because for this to work, you need both great user experience as well as great software.

Helm actually solves this exactly - they already have continuity of service coming in the pipeline, and the product as-it-ships will support encrypted backup/restore out of box, similar to how your iPhone supports iCloud backup.

I've run my own mail servers for Posterous before and it was probably 2 to 10 hours a month of maintenance, software updates, etc. And that's not something normals can do.

The company itself is run by folks who are committed to running this as a sustainable long term business that takes are of its customers and is super responsive to the community. As a board member I promise you we'll do that.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#107

Post by jstanley »

gsreenivas wrote: post #66
jstanley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This answer implies that you have no idea what the problem is, which doesn't bode well. The problem is that the major email hosts send to the spam folder any emails from IP addresses they don't explicitly trust. My solution to this is just to ignore it and tell people if they want to receive my email they should work out how, as the problem is on their end not mine. But lots of your customers won't like that answer.

hi jstanley - I was answering the question about retry when there's a service outage. Did you interpret the question differently?

Sorry! Yes, I thought you were answering a question about dealing with bounces in general. My mistake!

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#108

Post by cwyers »

garry wrote: post #105
andr wrote: post #65

I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center. - You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too. - Disk failure may lose all your data. - Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it. - You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the…

I'm the first and biggest investor in Helm and I'm on the board. I created email-based Posterous previously (YC funded) and was a YC partner for 5 years. I funded this team because they're high integrity software engineers first, and we built this out of need— a company like this needs to exist because for this to work, you need both great user experience as well as great software. Helm actually solves this exactly -…

If I can trust someone to do off-site cloud backups of my e-mail, why can't I trust the same person to run a Fastmail-like service so I don't have to have a $500 server in my house to get e-mail?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#110

Post by sinnoh »

andr wrote: post #65

I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center. - You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too. - Disk failure may lose all your data. - Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it. - You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the…

no one said you can only keep one copy of anything you own.
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