Meet Helm, the startup taking on Gmail with a server that runs in your home

[JoeFootball]

Interesting...

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... your-home/

Joe

[xenopeek]

The startup is betting that people will be willing to pay $500 to purchase the box and use it for one year to host some of their most precious assets in their own home. The service will cost $100 per year after that.

Holy moly, that's a lot. That $ 100 buys you a personal gateway hosted on Amazon cloud—which provides your Helm device with a static IP address, cloud storage to (optionally) backup your email online, and through which all your email is tunneled (securely if sender's mailserver uses TLS)—and yearly renewal of your custom domain name (value that at $ 8.50) They also renew your Let's Encrypt SSL certificate but that's completely free so shouldn't be included in what you get for that $ 100 anyway.

The company plans to announce a bug bounty program by year's end. In the meantime, whitehats can contact Helm […]

I read that as it isn't ready yet for worry-free use.

It's an interesting concept but a lot is riding on people willing to pay 4 times as much yearly as for a no-ads email provider, or 8 times as much for rolling your own solution with a Raspberry Pi.

The people behind Helm are answering question on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238581

[JoeFootball]

It's an interesting concept but a lot is riding on people willing to pay 4 times as much yearly as for a no-ads email provider, or 8 times as much for rolling your own solution with No-IP and a Raspberry Pi.

Yes, I agree that you can't overlook that price tag, and for people who have the skills to put together something functionally similar, then this does become less attractive.

But it is conceptually interesting, as it provides for an option for a self-managed in-home email server for those without the know-how (and don't want to bother learning how). For a price, indeed.

Joe

[xenopeek]

I'm hard pressed to name people that would care about this and not have the technical know-how to follow one of the many tutorials for doing the same with a Raspberry Pi.

[gm10]

I'm hard pressed to name people that would care about this and not have the technical know-how to follow one of the many tutorials for doing the same with a Raspberry Pi.

Resale market maybe. Someone without technical knowledge asks their tech guy and gets recommended this thing. Otherwise I also don't see it happening.

[JoeFootball]

I'm hard pressed to name people that would care about this and not have the technical know-how to follow one of the many tutorials for doing the same with a Raspberry Pi.

To your point, my credit card has not left my wallet. And thanks for that Hacker News discussion.

I agree with how that article's author concluded; it's a "noble experiment".

Joe