Helm: Personal Email Server • Hacker News Board

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#511

Post by codexon » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 3:20 AM UTC

gsreenivas wrote: post #481

cjbprime wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure how they can invest in that.

I've seen amazon ec2 ips being used for ddos attacks and I blacklist the entire range for many of my websites/projects. The vast majority of visitors we get from there are abusive.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#512

Post by franciscrick1 » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 3:28 AM UTC

Yeah, but is it RISCV?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#513

Post by jeannekamikaze » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC

A proprietary piece of hardware that connects to a proprietary, US-based cloud. This is the closest thing to garbage in the world of email.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#514

Post by O_H_E » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 3:49 AM UTC

franciscrick1 wrote: post #512

Yeah, but is it RISCV?

Nope, the specs page says that it's ARM Cortex processor.

RISC-V is still new and expensive for companies like this

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#515

Post by lrvick » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

i2shar wrote: post #391

lrvick wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you pay for this EC2 instance, and all traffic flows through it. Honest question: What stops a malicious employee on your end sshing to this server and dumping plaintext messages from memory? What stops a court from ordering you to do that? Even if you disable remote access, what stops someone from adding a new LaunchConfiguation that enables it silently on the next instance rotation in spite of whatever configur…

In all honesty, couldn't this be a question to Amazon for anything that ever runs on any EC2 instance? What makes you not distrust any cloud vendor when they manage every bit of your information including keys.

I -do- distrust all cloud vendors. My keys all reside in physically controlled HSMs.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#516

Post by vsl » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 4:28 AM UTC

lytedev wrote: post #500

ryan-c wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a totally different product vs Sendgrid/Mailgun/etc. Such a product would need to have a ToS that states it can only be used for low volume personal and business correspondence, and have per-account rate limiting to enforce that. Doing it this way is necessary to avoid having mail treated as bulk. I've tried relaying through mailgun to get mail to outlook.com, it does not work.

But this is exactly what I use mailgun for. The free price point kind of enforces that. Maybe it's just been so long I'm whitelisted?

More likely you actually set it up correctly, with DKIM and stuff, and the parent didn’t.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#517

Post by solipsism » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 4:32 AM UTC

Who is this for? The regular person doesn't trust Helm any more than they trust Google... nor do they care that much.

The privacy oriented techie doesn't trust Helm any more than they trust Google... so they're going to do everything themselves from scratch anyway, so what does Helm do for them?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#518

Post by latentpot » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 4:51 AM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #286

latentpot wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I need to buy a physical box? Cant they give me a dedicated EC2 Micro instance instead? Solve the ISP issue, and the speed/ connectivity/ power etc?

It's easier to convince someone that it's securely 'theirs' with hardware than if it seems like just another cloud email service?

How about a VM that I can host at a location of my choice? On prem, ec2, or a dedi somewhere?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#519

Post by pmontra » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:11 AM UTC

vonseel wrote: post #505

aidenn0 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pretty soon email will require stamps, like paper mail. I wonder if they will sell forever stamps? Jk, I just thought it was funny that we pay for services which were always seen as a free alternative to paper mail and stamps were a thing of the past.

Proof of Work basically was invented to cope with email spam. That's more or less a stamp.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#520

Post by morpheuskafka » Thu, Oct 18, 2018, 5:14 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #27

keehun wrote: post #3

Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns: 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? 2. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower d…

Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern. It has been a real struggle for me despite having a server I own in a rack with net-neighbors I know. Another big one for me is the failure modes. What do I do when my home connection is down? How about when my connection is down and I'm traveling? What happens when the hardware fails? How about when the hardware fails 5 years from n…

Last point especially. It would be like having all business contact go through IRC with no bouncer and no way to even tell if you were online.