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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#531

Post by wingerlang »

amelius wrote: post #467
salimmadjd wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I funded this team because they're high integrity software engineers first, and we built this out of need I looked for the founders bio, a company contact info. There is nothing on their site. All I saw was a letter in the "About" section by the founder. You might have gotten to know these guys after various meetings and due diligence process. There is nothing on their website that sells me on trusting them or the…

How would material on a website provide trust, without a means to verify that information?

While names, locations etc doesn't necessarily make something trustworthy - the absence of them do feel way more sketchy.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#533

Post by johnny22 »

m3nu wrote: post #524
hannob wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft? I run mail servers. I believe the idea that mail delivery is a problem for small mail providers is largely a myth. If you act somewhat reasonable (that is: if someone complains to you don't ignore it, don't send spam, check your logs for indications someone might put you on a blocklist) it's no…

Same experience. Mostly fine to run your own server. I check the blocklist status of the IP before moving/setting up a new server. We end up on Hotmail/Outlook's blocklist about once a year. They remove it within 1-2 hours after opening a ticket.

I lost $150 because a certain mail didn't arrive in time (an intercity bus trip ticket) when I couldn't actually afford to lose that money. I had to borrow money from a friend. Those 1-2 hours were quite valuable!

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#534

Post by panilsson »

Taranli_Maren wrote: post #176

This is an interesting project. I've been following FreedomBox for ages hoping it would end up as a good way to do this, but development has been slow. I do have some questions about the technical details: 1) Is email access provided through the Helm App, SMTP/IMAP, or is there a webmail interface as well? Can you use this device without a smartphone? 2) Which Linux distro is this based on? 3) What file system is use…

How about alternatives that are completely open https://www.kinguardproject.org/ ? As mentioned in other comments, having all the sources provides the possibility to review/recreate/modify the code to see what is really going on.

Disclaimer, I'm engaged in The Kinguard Project.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#535

Post by sarabande »

Is it necessary to have a hardware device for this to function? I'd love to pay $99/year for a 120 GB encrypted email service, but don't want the hassle of owning more stuff. I'd go with ProtonMail but it's seriously expensive for the data price (24€/mo = 288€/yr for just 20GB).

I also can't imagine that having a hardware device in-home actually reduces the unit costs of that storage, so if this were an on-line service priced even cheaper, I'd love to pay for it.

My concerns echo those of commenter 'andr'.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#536

Post by lolc »

lvh wrote: post #436
lolc wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may but they also hold the keys.

I mean, sure? You can use encryption to get security and privacy features but "FDE" isn't it. FDE is more important for Helm but that's a problem of their own design: suddenly the e-mail is in a box in my kitchen and it's a lot easier to walk out with a box in my kitchen than it is to walk out with a drive from us-east-2a :-) For anything in the cloud it's a belt-and-suspenders/compliance thing.

How many people have access to drives in us-east-2a? Do you know? Can you verify?

Assuming the software works flawlessly (if it doesn't, it doesn't matter where it runs) you'll need RAM and storage access to recover the keys and the data. If you're in the cloud, you won't notice when insiders or state agencies take a peek. If the device is in your home, you can set it up so you notice.

It all depends on the threat model.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#537

Post by beojan »

forapurpose wrote: post #208
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…

> Your Helm server will then initiate a TLS session with the server hosting your recipient's email I'm not sure how Helm doesn't see the metadata: * For outbound (as described) and inbound mail, do all mail servers support TLS connections? I was under them impression that many still communicate unencrypted. * How does Helm avoid seeing the metadata, who is communicating with whom and when?

It sounds like the hardware device is an SMTP server that sends the email itself directly over encrypted SMTP.

So, what's the subscription for?

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#538

Post by michaelmior »

gsreenivas wrote: post #476
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…

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.

Whether or not ISPs can figure it out is completely orthogonal to whether or not it's allowed.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#540

Post by JamesAdir »

Seems like an amazing solution for really a non-existent problem. The average consumer doesn't bother with his email privacy if he had other online solution would have been much more popular. The more technical consumer will probably would prefer to run something open source on his own server. So I wonder who is willing to buy and pay for this kind of solution.
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