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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.
Guess I should bust out my qmail/vpopmail scripts from 2003. Everything old is new again.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Problem with E-mail isn't in the "getting one running". It's the constant maintenance that's needed.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
So that your hosting provider doesn't have your data.
I think this company's bigger issue is their demographic: People who care enough about their e-mail privacy to desire to not-use Gmail, Outlook.com/Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo, want their own server, and are neither tech savvy enough to set up Zimbra / Mail-in-a-Box / the Synology mail server, nor big enough to use Exchange...and still use e-mail.
This trail was blazed by Microsoft back around 2008-2011 with Windows Home Server - enough server to help manage backups and malware scans (using Live OneCare) and centralize media storage/sharing, enough not-server to prevent it being used for Active Directory or similar. The problem was that it was still "too much server", and they couldn't market it well enough to get average consumers to really want it.
Circling back to the subject line, e-mail is primarily a business form of communication. When was the last time you got a legit, personally-written e-mail from anyone? It's probably been a while, and even if you still correspond with $SOME_PERSON regularly that way, it's far from the de facto form of digital communication it used to be. E-mail is basically for account setup and password resets, bulk mailers, and the occasional business correspondence. Most human-to-human communication tends to take place with Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or garden variety texting. Though people do still send and receive e-mails, it's been largely supplanted by semi-synchronous messages.
So, to review...an e-server tied to a single provider for the VPN / outbound relay, one or more annual fees to handle spam filtering, runs off Wi-Fi, doesn't fit in a server rack, isn't installable on custom hardware, and is intended to simplify a communications protocol from which home users have largely moved on?
I could be wrong...but it definitely doesn't sound like a winner to me.
Not as limited as you might think.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.