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Seattle Startup Vets Takes on Google with Helm, a New $499 Personal Email Server (geekwire.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

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.

11 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. lolwut? by HarrySquatter · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?

    1. Re:lolwut? by ilsaloving · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Are you kidding? Have you ever tried maintaining your own email server? $500 is dirt cheap compared to maintaining your own.

      Maybe it was fine in the old days where all you did was install linux and make sure sendmail/postfix was running, but in todays environment maintaining an email server is a bloody nightmare. DMARC records, SPF records, reverse IP mapping... SSL certificates and security rules... And lets not get into arbitrary nonsense rules that some companies set in a misguided attempt at combating spam.

      Even when you know what you're doing, it's a PITA. If you're not fully versed in all the intricacies of the various RFPs and SMTP servers in general, then you're going to have a particularly nasty time.

      Based on what I know, I can't help thinking that they might be biting off more than they can chew. But if they actually do pull it off, then they are going to make a completely justified mint.

  2. We called these qmail-toasters back in the day by Etcetera · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Guess I should bust out my qmail/vpopmail scripts from 2003. Everything old is new again.

    --
    Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
  3. Upkeep. by Ostracus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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"
    1. Re:Upkeep. by jittles · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Upkeep. by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Upkeep. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      When I set up an email server for my company, the biggest problem was getting the large email providers to not block all email from us as "spam" (we never sent ANY spam, were not on any spam lists or any server/domain/IP blacklists). We did everything right (DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, etc., etc.) but because we weren't sending tens of thousands of messages on a regular basis, we couldn't get recognized as a safe sender. The resolution process to get off the "block" and "spam" filters for most ISPs is apparently routed to /dev/null and had absolutely no effect. Eventually we gave up and paid google to host our email. I suspect "encouraging" you to pay for email hosting is at least as much the reason the large companies block messages from small senders as preventing spam is the reason.

  4. Not a word about spam filtering capabilities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Spam filtering is what makes e-mail usable nowadays and yet on the official site they choose to ignore it completely.

  5. Re:Yep, so wouldn't you just leave all that by shaitand · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So that your hosting provider doesn't have your data.

  6. This is a niche product by davidwr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  7. Who uses E-Mail Anymore? by Voyager529 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.