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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.
Helm today unveiled its $499 device that lets consumers send and receive email from their own domain,
Is this an April Fools joke that was posted too early? What dumbass would pay that much money for this?
Lot's of home IPS block ports that make this not work.
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"
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.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
It needs some obscure cloud service to hook up to do you can configure it. That's attached to a subscription.
How about just building a piece of useful groupware with easy domain configuration and easy ssl cert integration and letting the hardware as a option?
Somehow I feel this will fail just as hard as Protonet.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The port problem is easy to solve by offering optional port-forwarding subscriptions to forward "incoming mail to your domain" ports to a user-selected non-blocked port.
Also, most home users can buy business-contract internet in their homes, which typically allow all incoming ports.
The same people who would pay $500 for this box are the same people who would buy either of the above services.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Spam filtering is what makes e-mail usable nowadays and yet on the official site they choose to ignore it completely.
So that your hosting provider doesn't have your data.
yeah, the same morons that pay for credit protection to lifelock...
nothing to see here - move along
There is a market for this kind of thing, but it's a small one.
If I am a very small company or an individual who needs "in house" email where no third party can be subpoenaed and where I control the encryption keys, AND where it's easy to run with minimal management, that is worth paying for.
But for most companies small enough where this would be worth considering, a completely outsourced email solution is better. For almost all individuals, outsourced email is better.
In the unlikely event that something like this gets more than "niche market" traction, expect the major players to either buy these guys out or come out with competing products. There's not much in this product that is innovative enough that the proprietary features, if any, can't be worked around and/or that customers won't care about them enough to deter competition.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It seems that (some) people are beginning to realize the cost of “free” services, but I wonder if they care enough to do anything about it.
Getting smtp to your home connection could be an issue for many as that port is usually blocked to prevent malware spamming. Sometimes you can request it opened.
When I ran my own email server, there was a bit of maintenance with spam filters as well as problems with some destinations not accepting emails from servers on xDSL lines.
L'Idiot
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.
Then you still have to trust a 3rd party. So how is this different from trusting any other provider (other than being really expensive)?
Preface: https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/
Substance: I am not normally a betting guy, but I would wager that 95% plus of the US population would not have the ability to get beyond 50% delvierability for "legitimate" emails using such a device. I am ASSUMIng that the outbound connections from the "device" to the recipients MX server would originate from the user's local IP address (unless they also include some kind of outbound relay service, which would seem to be self-defeating in this context). Many (perhaps even a "large majority") email server operators use services which are designed to reduce spam, and one of the most common ways this is done is by blocking incoming connections, either at the MTA or network level, based on a range of "known dynamic IP addresses", i.e. the IP address ranges assigned by an ISP to customers who have not chosen (or do not have the option to chose) a static IP address for their connection. Organizations like Spamhaus publish / provide access to lists of such ranges which email server administrators can use to automatically block or flag messages coming from "standard"/"dynamic"/"non-static"/"consumer and small business" IP address ranges.
While I like the concept, I think any customer of this product is likely going to be disappointed in their message deliverability unless the either A) have the money and the inclination to get a static IP address for their connection (if their ISP even offers that as an option - MANY do not, either at all or for non-business accounts) and deal with the side effects that come along with it, or B) use a third party external relay service to send their messages, thereby eliminating (or at least reducing) the utility of such a device in the first place.
I'm not saying your wrong. It is very difficult to setup and maintain a secure email server, 15yrs ago setting up linux mail servers for small businesses who wanted private mail was a big part of my job. These are all almost certainly going to be spam zombies within a couple years.
All I'm saying is that the reasons to want to do it haven't changed. Putting all your data, even confidential business data, in the hands of a third party is one of the greatest crimes of spammers.
Except you are relaying through them so they get all your data as well as $99 a year.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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.
On your own mail server you don't have to make assumptions like that.