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Seattle Startup Vets Takes on Google with Helm, a New $499 Personal Email Server (geekwire.com)
A Seattle-area startup is aiming to take on giants such as Google and change the way we do email with a new physical personal email server. From a report: Helm today unveiled its $499 device that lets consumers send and receive email from their own domain, in addition to saving contacts and calendar events. It's a bold bet that aims to provide comfort at a time when privacy and security issues related to personal data hosted by big tech companies in the cloud are top of mind. The idea comes from Giri Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, two entrepreneurs who already sold a security startup and raised a $4 million seed round from top venture capital firms last year.
The device is about the size of a router and looks like an upside-down book placed on a table. It connects to a home network and pairs with a mobile app that lets users create their own domain name, passwords, and recovery keys. Helm support standard protocols and works with regular email clients such as Outlook or the Mail app, with encryption protecting connection between the device and the apps.
The device is about the size of a router and looks like an upside-down book placed on a table. It connects to a home network and pairs with a mobile app that lets users create their own domain name, passwords, and recovery keys. Helm support standard protocols and works with regular email clients such as Outlook or the Mail app, with encryption protecting connection between the device and the apps.
Looks like the device sets up a VPN back to them that they can send mail out from with a static IP and reverse dns.
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Problem with E-mail isn't in the "getting one running". It's the constant maintenance that's needed.
The real problem here (assuming that they provide all that upkeep for you in a reliable way) is that no one will accept your mail if you do not have a reverse DNS entry for your IP. Not to mention the fact that ISPs block the necessary ports to run this on a home network. You’d have to have a business service plan to get this to work and you had better have a static IP address also.
About 15 years ago, I set up a private email server for our company. I'd been running a private email server for personal use since the 1990s so didn't think it would be that different. Was I ever wrong.
I was called numerous times after I'd gone home from work by employees working a later shift saying email wasn't working. For my personal email I'd just go to sleep and fix it the next morning But these people needed email to do their work, so I had to come back in and fix it ASAP. Then there were the numerous mail servers I had to petition to remove our server from their spam blacklists every month. Other people on our ISP sometimes had their computers compromised and used to send spam, and these servers were blocking the entire IP address range of our ISP. For my personal email, I would never need to send email to a lot of these servers so being blacklisted by them was inconsequential. But multiply it by all the mail servers 50 employees send email to, and suddenly you need to resolve all these blocks.
After a few months of this I threw in the towel, and signed us up for an outside email hosting service. They're staffed 24/7, so when email goes down someone there gets it fixed, usually within a few minutes. And clearing up spam blacklists is their problem - we just have to report the block. If your company is big enough to have IT staff on duty or on call 24/7 then I can see a private email server working out. But if your company is that big you're not going to run your email server on a $500 appliance.
It is not sufficient to have a correct reverse DNS entry. For example, you cannot send email to one of the big freemailers in Germany, GMX, if
- The PTR-RR states that the IP address was dynamically allocated, or
- The PTR-RR is a generic standard entry of your provider. Please allocate an independent and fully qualified domain name (Fully Qualified Domain Name - FQDN) to your email server and enter the corresponding valid PTR-RR.
Email is a mess. The spammers have almost killed it and the antispammers are finishing the job.