Comment by stevehawk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevehawk | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'm the target market for this as I pay for Fastmail ..

1 - how many domains can I use? I currently use ~6 with my Fastmail account 2 - can I have multiple users? I recognize that fastmail doesn't let me but at this price point I would want it. It looks like you support that but I'm unsure. 3 - How do you convince my ISP to let me receive traffic on the ports required to run a mail server? (most firewall them on residential accounts) 4 - If I were this committed to my email, why wouldn't I just set it up for free myself? This is actually my biggest question in regards to the product/target market. Are there that many people out there that both care about how email works to this degree and aren't willing to host their own?

The website is heavy on theatrics and bold statements but I feel actually kind of lacking in terms of the meat. There's more than a few parts made it difficult for me to get any information at all (the automatic slide show on the Product page, the 'see the inside' slideshow on the tech page). If I had to guess I'd say this site wasn't tested against Firefox (doesn't seem that any are anymore due to its low market sharE).

hey stevehawk - thanks for your questions. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Helm. Let me take them one by one: 1 - how many domains can I use? Each Helm Personal Server currently supports 1 domain 2 - Can I have multiple users? Yes, we have no limits on the number of users. 3 - Please see my response above about how we navigate around ISPs blocking ports. We route traffic through an EC2 instance with an iptables configuration and an outbound VPN connection. We utilize Let's Encrypt certs for this traffic to be encrypted with TLS. 4 - I've run my own email server for 15 years. It's a pain and more and more people are willing to pay for convenience and peace of mind that comes from a dedicated team like ours looking out for them.

On the meat - we have a post coming tomorrow that is the first in a series where we will dive into the technology.

Regarding Firefox issues, please email me at giri@thehelm.com and we'll look into it. We have avid Firefox users on our team and did test it but may have missed some things.

Thanks for your questions and let me know if I can answer any more.

I appreciate the response. Anecdotal situation - I have to admit the 1 domain thing is a drawback for me. In order for me to commit the financials to this I'd need to be able to use it for more domains (ie, spread the costs across my personal businesses as well). As a solution for 1 domain only it has the feel of Silicon Valley millionaires solving problems for Silicon Valley millionaires.

There is no break-even point on this because by default the subscription is more than Fastmail, including their business offering, and even amortizing the device over a decade is still a stretch (what device lasts a decade anymore?). I think what I'm realizing is that even with a gross annual household income over half a mil USD is that I can put a price on email and it's lower than this.

All of that said I do think you've got a neat product. The EC2 solution for tunneling is novel and explains the higher subscription cost. I hope you are successful because I'm curious to see what version 2 would be like service/pricing wise.

Thanks for the feedback stevehawk. We'll look to support multiple domains - right now costs scale with the number of domains due to the simple fact of supporting reverse DNS.

Your setup with Let's encrypt certificates is exactly what I was thinking about. I was thinking however about a one step further. Put the server on a smartphone. This way you're pretty much covered most of the time. Also one could be notified as soon as email is incoming. I thought also about a home server that would be used as a secondary.

It would be best to give ability to create random subdomains, so a user can have a separate addresses for everyone. Then it would be easy to filter out spam on the proxy level. Which is crucial for a server on a mobile phone.

Hi gsreenivas,

I hope you end up seeing this.

I feel like am your target user for this product. I want to be able to isolate the majority of my data away from these large corporations (namely Google), email is probably the hardest one for me to do myself. I really want to use your product.

BUT, and this is a HUGE but, I am a web developer and I have like 15 domain names. Some from old businesses, some for just random stuff. I accept email from all of them and have online accounts tied to many of them. In order for me to use this product, I absolutely need to bring ALL my domain names with me.

In fact, the number of supported domain names is the primary feature I look at when comparing email providers. If it doesn't support the amount that I have, I immediately disregard it, doesn't matter what else they be offering.

So please reconsider the number of domain names. I imagine there are lots of users like me.

Best of luck to you and your team!

Hey mrgalaxy - thanks for your note. We will take a look at how we can support this more efficiently. Right now we don't because we support reverse DNS for all our customers.

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