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Helm: Personal Email Server

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#471

Post by newman314 »

dsigurds wrote: post #448
newman314 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding #3, let's work through two use cases. A) I'm at home and B) I'm on the road. A) I can connect directly, no biggie. B) I am assuming that you would require a port opened/forwarded in the firewall to work in this case. Is this correct?

Hi newman314, we have a gateway server that we as a company manage the gives you remove access back to your Helm. We do this without requiring you to poke holes in your firewall because the Helm establishes an outbound VPN connection to the gateway.

Thanks.

Please see my other questions here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18243685

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#472

Post by jethro_tell »

newman314 wrote: post #426
gsreenivas wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi keehun - thanks for posting this on HN! I'm the co-founder and CEO of Helm. 1 - First, we cross reference IP addresses we assign to gateway against known blacklists. This helps ensure emails will be delivered. We also fully support email authentication (DMARC, DKIM, SPF) and configure reverse DNS as well. Lastly, the IP address for a gateway stays fixed so the domain and IP will build reputation over time. Helm se…

Regarding #3, let's work through two use cases. A) I'm at home and B) I'm on the road. A) I can connect directly, no biggie. B) I am assuming that you would require a port opened/forwarded in the firewall to work in this case. Is this correct?

A) I can connect directly

Can you? you'll probably need your own DNS resolver because if the clients are configured for my.custom.domain.com, it's not going to resolve to 10.10.10.10 and your connection is down. So you can have the box do that, but generally, split horizon DNS is a thing you don't want to set up in a set it and forget it install.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#473

Post by wil421 »

IPTN wrote: post #444
wil421 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The telcos only enforce the server rule if you are causing problems like doing something illegal, torrenting, or maxing out your bandwidth 24/7. I’ve had multiple servers running over the years and never had any issues with Comcast or AT&T. Generally they don’t care if it’s for personal use. I’ve heard of them shutting people down for something they saw as business related. They didn’t really get shut down, it was mo…

What ISP do you have that you can get upgrade to a business account with the same speeds for only $30 extra a month? AT&T would charge me $300/mo for the same speeds that I currently pay $80/mo for.

You are comparing the most expensive plan. This was probably 8 years ago so I’m thinking 10-15mbit. The business plan was the entry level one.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#474

Post by jethro_tell »

le-mark wrote: post #385
ChuckMcM wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, the way the big boys get around this is outbound email filtering. Limits yes, session and connection heuristics, reading your outbound email to see if you're selling dick pills.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#475

Post by ekianjo »

tracker1 wrote: post #469

Don't most home ISPs block inbound server ports? I know Cox in particular does, as well as a few others. I have a business account for this reason that I pay a bit more (better support response too), but not sure if this is something a lot of people can even use without a backing service. Cool idea though. As an aside, any suggestions on easy to install/configure/update mail in a box + letsencrypt options? Thinking o…

They block port 25, but secure ports are usually open.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#476

Post by gsreenivas »

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…

We don't believe it does. ISPs will only see encrypted traffic (a VPN tunnel to the gateway) so it's unclear how they will figure it's associated with a server.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#477

Post by amichal »

sandworm101 wrote: post #413
ktpsns wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, with Unitymedia Buisness, I get symmetric 100Mbit/sec over coax (even in mid-size cities), a static IPv4 adresse and excellent customer service. Price tag: 35EUR/month.

Canada. 100$/month for 150down/12 up residential. Never seen more than 50 down. Regular outages (for 30min every few days). If the US is third-world in terms of service, canada is an uncontacted amazon tribe.

Vermont. 60/6 for $100/mo. And I’m a lucky one. I have friends with 3mbit dsl and there are pockets of dialup

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#478

Post by gsreenivas »

lrvick wrote: post #364
dna_polymerase wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the E-Mail server still runs locally. While they could intercept traffic on their VPN endpoint, the traffic should be encrypted (TLS). However, I am not to sure if all e-mail servers speak TLS to each other.

Well if it does VPN first, then initiates the SMTP connection with TLS on the local smtp server all the way to the RX mail server, then this works out fine. A lot of mail servers don't support this though, so it would be on the client to also be able to ensure it will not relay mail except to TLS endpoints verified by a well known CA. In my experience this is rarely the case, but if it is and Helm is willing to tell…

Yes - we initiate a VPN connection first to the gateway, then inbound/outbound connections are over TLS. Over 92% of email traffic is over TLS and we will be exposing an option in the future where customers can require it or reject emails.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#480

Post by gsreenivas »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #392
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…

if your company folds and the cloud service goes offline, does that render my helm useless? that wouldn't make me feel like i "own [my] email".

Two things: we will run the service in perpetuity as long as there are subscribers and we will be open sourcing what is required to run the service on your own.
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