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Helm: Personal Email Server

thehelm.com

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Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#591
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So if they route everything through the same set of EC2 instances, that might actually take care of the SPAM issue. I run my own e-mail server and have run into that same issue of not being able to send to gmail/microsoft addresses (unless I contact the person via Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. and tell them to check their spam folder): https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made... The way most of the…

> The big players make it difficult to run a small personal server

how so? the way i see it, only by making it too easy to use them. if you mean, they reject mail from (eg) dynamically assigned home subscriber IP addresses, you can blame spammers for that, not the big email players.

There's little to no additional security from having email on-site, and much hassle. Assuming you use google or outlook, the advertising bogeyman is just that - a bogeyman.

this is a super niche product, with a lot of useless industro-consumer design thrown in. it's doomed as a business and then where are you? back to gmail.

Re: Helm: Personal Email Server

#592
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

According to their FAQ, you are basically on your own since your device is the MX server: > While offline, emails sent to you will not be delivered. This does not, however, mean that they are lost. If your email server becomes unreachable for any reason, the sender’s email server will periodically retry sending the email at a later time. Email servers are generally configured to retry rapidly at first and then back o…

the sounds exactly like the nightmare the GP proposed. what happens when you're on vacation? or even not on vacation but the supply chain is borked or UPS loses your package? even if helm is self-configuring from stored cloud config, this is still a pain and being without email for even a day is painful. 3-5 days (more likely) is intolerable. and if it's longer mail will start to bounce.
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