Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 592 posts

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#381

Post by gyger »

wink wrote: post #373
8fingerlouie wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. When it comes to consumer internet services, the US is a 3rd world country, which is kinda odd considering most of the western world does their business there. I just checked the terms on my 300/300 fiber connection, as well as my (backup, company paid) 25/5 ADSL. They're almost identical: * no spamming. * no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uplo…

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. Germany's third biggest city, I can only get 50/10 Mbit, maybe 100/20 - no fiber in sight. No static IP and no guarantees anyone will accept mail from this dialup subnet. /s

I guess, you are glad leaving in Germany. A country with a bad state in terms of Internet.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#382

Post by kirillzubovsky »

trendia wrote: post #325
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the founders and can confidently say this is anything but a cash grab. They don’t andvertise this fact, but the guys are really into privacy, and they want to see this come to life for the sake of data protection. VC funding is the means to make it a reality, as good hardware is expensive and takes time to get right.

> as good hardware is expensive They don't need to sell hardware to achieve what they're doing. In the current form, they are mainly selling a service (SMTP relay on EC2) disguised as hardware (imx board inside a fancy box). Why not charge the service for $100/year and allow anyone to use a Raspberry Pi and USB flash drive, which costs $35+$20? If they're using Linux on an imx, then there's likely little difficulty i…

If I understand what you are asking correctly, then you are not wrong, and there's definitely an option to do this, but you are not the customer they are looking for.

If you have the chops to get a Rpi running, then you probably know how to run a mail server or you are definitely able to read an EXIM book and get it going on EC2 in a day... with all the consequences.

On the other hand, if you are a business professional, or a crypto holder, or a privacy concerned mom, you don't have the time and chops to go through the setup. What you want is an "iPhone for email", and this is what Helm will provide.

One device, simple setup, no hassle, all updates and management are taken care for you. It's beautiful, and $99/y isn't going to sway you. I pay $100/m for Comcast and get subpar internet in return, but I am not going to go and setup an ISP to save money.

That said, if you think this is a good idea but could be done at $100/y sub on a Pi, perhaps is a great time to start a competing service ;)

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#383

Post by bhauer »

jawns wrote: post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

I use AT&T and they removed the port 25 block on request. In my experience, they do not enforce any policies regarding self-hosting. I think they have boilerplate that they would use if one were to continuously saturate their upstream, but I've never seen them doing anything to affect my personal services.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#384

Post by tosser0001 »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #350
jawns wrote: post #9

Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…

I'm so glad to be living in Europe. When it comes to consumer internet services, the US is a 3rd world country, which is kinda odd considering most of the western world does their business there. I just checked the terms on my 300/300 fiber connection, as well as my (backup, company paid) 25/5 ADSL. They're almost identical: * no spamming. * no racism/unethical behavior. * no portscanning. * no illegal downloads/uplo…

I don't know what the rest of the country looks like, but I have home Comcast in the US and have been self-hosting a server on port 80 with a similar more-or-less static IP as you've described for well-over a decade. Many of my friends have the same setup. It never even occurred to me that Comcast cared. All ports are open (maybe not 25, I haven't checked.)

I guess the terms of service allows them to shut someone down if they felt like it, but I wouldn't really worry about it. If you have a site that generates so much traffic they even took notice, I presume you'd want to be on a real hosted environment anyway.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#385

Post by le-mark »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #346
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 believe you will be more successful if you establish two things, first your own ASIN with a couple of class C IPV4 blocks and an IPV6 block. Then you create an infrastructure for relaying the mail from your boxes to the Internet. Then you work with the various spam agencies to create both a way to respond to spam complaints and to detect and throttle or cut off spam senders. You'll find that spammers will offer to…

and to detect and throttle or cut off spam senders

Isn't throttling outbound email count/day from the start the only real solution?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#386

Post by joezydeco »

iancarroll wrote: post #353
joezydeco wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We spin our own build of Linux...We are using an ARM-based SoC from NXP. Okay, so that narrows it down to the i.MX family. We chose this to ensure that the device can only run signed, trusted code by implementing secure boot and signature verification of software updates. Maybe read this? https://blog.quarkslab.com/vulnerabilities-in-high-assurance...

From the technical specs, it's almost certainly the i.MX 8, which as far as I know is not affected or listed on any of the errata for that vulnerability.

I missed the part on the tech page that listed the A72, so yeah it's an iMX8.

Hopefully the HAB fix is the reason for the 8. Otherwise this seems like overkill for the work involved.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#387

Post by trendia »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #382
trendia wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as good hardware is expensive They don't need to sell hardware to achieve what they're doing. In the current form, they are mainly selling a service (SMTP relay on EC2) disguised as hardware (imx board inside a fancy box). Why not charge the service for $100/year and allow anyone to use a Raspberry Pi and USB flash drive, which costs $35+$20? If they're using Linux on an imx, then there's likely little difficulty i…

If I understand what you are asking correctly, then you are not wrong, and there's definitely an option to do this, but you are not the customer they are looking for. If you have the chops to get a Rpi running, then you probably know how to run a mail server or you are definitely able to read an EXIM book and get it going on EC2 in a day... with all the consequences. On the other hand, if you are a business professio…

If a .iso is provided, I can't see why flashing a custom "Helm iso" is any different from flashing the default "Raspberry Pi iso", and there are a lot of people who can flash the raspbian -- there have been 5 - 10 million raspberry pi's sold so far. So, I think there are a lot of people who can use the Raspberry Pi.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#388

Post by dsigurds »

graybolt wrote: post #281
specialp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are proxying the content with a VPN with a static IP on an EC2 instance you cannot police people sending out spam as you cannot see and meter the SMTP traffic. So does everyone get a dedicated instance and IP? If that is the case people are going to have issues getting their email accepted by almost all providers due to the IP being new and on a cloud provider block. If it is a subset of IPs that you create a…

I think this is the biggest problem. If there are a lot of bad actors, you drag down the whole system, but if you try to prevent bad actors you run into a lot of issues. A hard problem, and I don't envy anyone trying to solve it.

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.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#389

Post by jigi8484ncnc »

michaelmior wrote: post #322
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…

> 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 an…

If I host a Quake 3 server I’m in violation of the TOS.

It can be argued that using a browser or any other client violates that language by sending responses to requests.

The ISP won’t do squat if it’s encrypted; they have no idea who is being connected to and what’s being sent.

A TOS is as broad and vague as they can make it. A good lawyer could undermine such language if it went to court.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#390

Post by yingbo »

garry wrote: post #252
yingbo wrote: post #118

I always own my email. The title itself is misleading and decreases my trust to the Helm.

Well the point is that if you trust a cloud provider, you don't own your email because Google owns it too. They have it all, in plaintext.

If I leave my car in a garage for repairing, I still own the car, even the garage can access it.

That means, even google can scan my emails, I still own the emails. The topic is about privacy while the title makes it to ownership. That's the misleading part.

Post reply on HN