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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#451

Post by dboreham »

jigi8484ncnc wrote: post #389
michaelmior wrote: post #322

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 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.

Ultimately the TOS exists so the provider can discontinue your service, so it doesn't have to be super tight legally.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#452

Post by ryan-c »

newman314 wrote: post #429
ryan-c wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WRT to TLS, see here: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h... It seems that Helm has no obligation or business need to log any metadata if they are providing each customer with a dedicated relay. Any abuse will come from that relay IP and can trivially be attributed to the correct customer.

According to this page ( https://thehelm.com/pages/technology ), the following is logged. * Name, address, payment information, domain, DNS records * Device diagnostics (such as temperature), software versions, enabled services, connection status, connection type, serial number * Anything related to customer support, including information customers provide So plenty of information to uniquely identify a system. The l…

I don't see what the issue with uniquely identifying a system is. The main metadata of concern is what other mail servers are being interacted with.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#453

Post by ryan-c »

aidenn0 wrote: post #420
tyre wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rate-limiting would be interesting. If the cost of the service was specifically high enough to be unscalable. Like, $10 per month and you can send 200 emails per day. That’s expensive compared to anything else but fine for personal use.

fastmail already is available for $10 per month, so I guess problem solved?

Do they handle a send-only smarthost configuration that allows arbitrary from addresses within a domain?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#455

Post by bigiain »

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.

I can see that going both ways.

The feds know that Apple (for example) are fully lawyered up, and that they need all their legally required paperwork with it's "i"s dotted and "t"s crossed before Apple will even look at their request for your data. While we know they _will_ hand over legally required data when they can and the paperwork is OKed by their legal department, they also very publicly go head to head with law enforcement when those requests are legally questionable or technically impossible.

I suspect an overly broad probable cause warrant to seize all the electronic devices in your house is gonna be much easier to slip past an leo friendly judge and whatever legal representation you can muster up when they dawn-raid you - than "slipping one past" Apple's legal team.

Having said that, if you've got the feds interested in your digital comms, you probably want to be getting your security advice from a much more private and trustworthy source than randoms on Hackernews...

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#456

Post by dang »

cwyers wrote: post #277
dang wrote: post #172

Please don't be a jerk on HN ("Oh come on", "modern art installation"). Your question would be just fine without those bits. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood. Comment edited.

Appreciated! I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18239371 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#458

Post by bigiain »

Hello71 wrote: post #92
rataata_jr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very good open source projects, namely rspamd etc.

That helps check that you don't receive spam (and even so, rspamd is much weaker when applied to only one account). It doesn't fix sending other people what looks like spam.

I recall one of the major bulk mail services (perhaps Campaign Monitor?) has a service where you can feed your intended outbound mail into a large range of spam checking services before you send it, to alert you to problems in your mail that are likely to trigger spam filters.

(On the other side of that problem though, if my email account starts sending mail "what looks like spam", it's almost certainly because my account's been compromised and is actually sending spam. There's a _start_ difference between typical personal person-to-person email and spam. I suspect _some_ business email might blur the line there - but part of me thinks if your business email is blurring the line about being "spammy", then it deserves to get filtered...)

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#459

Post by bigiain »

briffle wrote: post #283
paraditedc wrote: post #241

I read the whole tech page and some of the comments here. I might be willing to pay for this service, but not in its current form. I wouldn't want to spend 500USD on a proprietary hardware in addition to paying a subscription fee. What needs to happen to convince me to pay: Open up the hardware component as a platform for anyone to extend (allowing direct ssh, or using my own hardware). It's fine to not open source t…

Honestly, I would rather see it as a paid add-on to something like a synology or qnap..

To be fair - building a business like Helm while needing to deal with other people's hardware and their software updates which you wouldn't find out broke your product until your customers start screaming about their email not working - wouldn't be fun. I could easily see how someone could want to do that and seriously consider it, then discard it as an option (or at least as part of their MVP launch options).

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#460

Post by bigiain »

radlad wrote: post #380
naber wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gray area IMHO. Isn't Dropcam basically a server streaming video to my phone?

I'm pretty sure that video feed is actually sent to your phone through a Dropcam cloud server. Your Dropcam is a client which connects to the cloud server, as is your phone.

Arguably that's the exact same architecture Helm are describing. The EC2 instance your Helm box VPNs into is (arguably) "the server" - in that it's the "public service" endpoint. A good lawyer could eloquently argue that the Helm device on your residential internet connection is no more "running as a server" than the Dropbox or Google Drive apps on your laptop or phone...

(Note: I've been doing a similar home-rolled version of this, where I have a mail server under my couch that opens a reverse ssh tunnel and forwards port 25 and 465 from whichever transient EC2/Azure/DigitalOcean/Hertzner/CloudAtCost VPS Ive got listed as my MX records. A little bit of Route53 API automation, some Ansible to set up the ssh tunnelling, and some "canary" gmail and live.com email addresses to check outbound deliverability when I go to switch VPSs... It's been running pretty much untouched since 2014 or so...)

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