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

481–490 of 592 posts

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#481

Post by gsreenivas »

cjbprime wrote: post #330
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…

Outgoing email from EC2 nodes isn't trusted by recipient domains either. That's why AWS wants you to use SES instead.

Amazon invests in ensuring their Elastic IPs are not on blacklists. Less than 2% of IPs we get through AWS are ever on a blacklist and when they are, we cycle through until we get one that isn't.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#482

Post by gsreenivas »

newman314 wrote: post #416
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…

What VPN solution are you using? Wireguard or something else? Do you have a plan to help make email security features easy to consume: SPF, DMARC, MTA-STS etc.? Is there a way to opt out on the information that is collected? I looked on your site but it does not show a logical architecture which might be useful for some of us.

We are using StrongSwan right now. We've taken a close look at WireGuard but have not yet completed our evaluation.

We automatically configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC for our customers. We are also investigating MTA-STS.

Device diagnostics are opt-in by default so they are not collected. Customer data like shipping and billing information is not opt-out unfortunately as we need to be able to process payments, ship the unit and track warranty coverage.

Appreciate the feedback on wanting more architectural details. This will be coming in a series of technical posts explaining how we designed and built the product. Stay tuned and thanks for your questions!

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#483

Post by gsreenivas »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #175
specialp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by blocking "wholesale"? I started hosting an email server in EC2 and the worst I've had is my emails going to a spam folder if that person hasn't received an email from my address yet (and never after they've marked me as not being spam). That happened surprisingly rarely and didn't feel like much worse than I would get by just sending people email from gmail with an address they don't know. I don't…

This is very consistent with what our experience has been with Elastic IPs combined with email authentication and blacklist monitoring.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#484

Post by gsreenivas »

specialp wrote: post #271
CogitoCogito wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by blocking "wholesale"? I started hosting an email server in EC2 and the worst I've had is my emails going to a spam folder if that person hasn't received an email from my address yet (and never after they've marked me as not being spam). That happened surprisingly rarely and didn't feel like much worse than I would get by just sending people email from gmail with an address they don't know. I don't…

It depends on whom you send to. Like ironically I sent an abuse complaint to Verizon for a spammer and got rejected because they blocked all of Digital Ocean's IP space. Yahoo was particularly difficult too sending me a response saying they won't take my mail immediately on a single email to my brother. I had to go through a lot to get that fixed. Again this was due to being on cloud provider IP space. GMail is more…

unfortunately DO does not seem to be as active as Amazon in maintaining the reputation of their IPs.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#485

Post by danilocesar »

bigiain wrote: post #455
ryan-c wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Also, if the feds raide your home you will know that your data was compromised. Apple won/can't tell you..

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#486

Post by dragonwriter »

danilocesar wrote: post #485
bigiain wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Also, if the feds raide your home you will know that your data was compromised. Apple won/can't tell you..

> Also, if the feds raide your home you will know that your data was compromised.

Not necessarily: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneak_and_peek_warrant

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#487

Post by ryan-c »

johntash wrote: post #468
ryan-c wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If everything has to go through their relay, they can pretty easily see what mail servers are being interacted with.

Yes, but they don't have to log that, and given the way the system is described there's no reason it would by default.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#488

Post by masukomi »

rsingel wrote: post #306
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…

Also the fact that we can't run servers from our home connections is ripe for a challenge if we ever get net neutrality protections back. The 2015 Order said this, "A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management." I would argue that bann…

doesn't matter if we are contractually allowed to run them or not. The dynamic IPs of consumer ISPs are all blacklisted by the spam blockers. So, you could receive mail, but no-one would ever receive yours.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#489

Post by gsich »

ryan-c wrote: post #221
pmoriarty wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since most email's not encrypted, how is having each Helm user's email hop through your server any better for them in terms of privacy than just hosting their email on a remote mail provider in the first place? You could still record every incoming and outgoing email as it goes through your server, couldn't you? I really don't see the advantage of Helm.

Most (gmail claims ~90%) email is encrypted with opportunistic TLS in transit and can't be passively monitored. https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h... Further, "the provider could intercept email" and "the provider stores all email" are very very different.

This is transport encryption, not actual email encryption.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#490

Post by agentdrtran »

I have no idea who this is for. Non-technical people don't care, and this is still too complex for them. Technical people can use Fastmail or other secure, hosted options. $500 for proprietary hardware is so steep, there are software options for the Rpi that do something similar for $40!
Post reply on HN