71–80 of 592 posts
I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center. - You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too. - Disk failure may lose all your data. - Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it. - You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the…
$99/year? They are targeting an extremely small market. I can get Fastmail for a fraction of that amount, and I don't see much of an advantage with this - and I'm one of the few willing to pay for something I get elsewhere for free.
I mean, "a fraction" is "half" in this case, which is actually pretty close to par in my mind. And that's what I pay for one address for a year; so if this is more addresses and more domains at better scaling prices, that's quite interesting.
??! No, half is half. Strange response. It's $50/year, and the $50/year charged by Fastmail is already quite steep for email.
Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…
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…
I understand that it's just an encrypted VPN connection, and are not actually storing email on the EC2 instances. But is there any way for your customers to ensure that? Can your customers shell into the Helm and/or EC2 instance(s)?
Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…
Holy crap, US ISPs are completely absurd. This definitely isn't a thing (or at least not enforced in any way) in Canada; most of my friends run on-prem web services out of their basements or closets.
This looks really interesting, but I'm disappointed that you apparently _need_ a subscription to their DDNS-like service. In a lot of cases, users may be paying for a static IP from their ISPs (or even have one for free, by default), or they may be running their own DDNS via a cloud instance already. This does nothing but add a $100/year fee for something that is exceptionally non-reusable and narrowly-scoped.
It's rad, does all of the DNS/SSL/DKIM foo necessary to make your email fully deliverable, includes contacts and calendar sync, is multi-user, multi-domain, etc.
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…
> 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 off and increase the time between retries.
> Once your email server comes back online and a retry is performed, you will successfully receive the sent email. If your email server is offline for an extended period of time, the sending server will eventually give up and send a bounce message to the person who sent you the email.
Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this? Comcast terms: > use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited t…
Emphasis added: > provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network I'm not sure if Verizon has the same intention, but if they take their own wording exceptionally strict, you would be in the wrong whenever you play a multiplayer game and end up being the host. Generally in my own experience they don't want you hosting a service opened to the general public running a…
Now the terms still would give them an out if they decided they didn’t want you, but honestly as long as you’re not hurting the network they’d rather take your money.