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According to their blog post How Helm Works - Part 1: Networking [0], on the AWS side of things, for each Helm unit, they are provisioning an EC2 instance, an E
by 1MachineElf 5y ago
According to their blog post How Helm Works - Part 1: Networking [0], on the AWS side of things, for each Helm unit, they are provisioning an EC2 instance, an Elastic IP, and a Route 53 config. I suppose the 128GB backup is also part of this. From my perspective, $99/yr is not a bad deal for all this to be automatically managed.
[0] https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networking https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networki...
- thesausageking 5y agoSo you're tied to an EC2 instance? That seems like an unnecessary centralization point.
- awill 5y agoyep. It serves to justify the subscription though, which is what all businesses want. Ongoing money vs a one-time purchase. I personally quite like the idea of an appliance for email. But adding a permanent subscription that not only costs a lot of money, but will stop working if the company has an outage or goes out of business means it isn't targetted at me. If you require AWS and have offsite backups then the product isn't an 'own your own data' product as it's advertised. At that point, why not just pay for managed email. It's cheaper, and probably easier to migrate if there are problems.
- stefan_ 5y agoSo the first thing this "personal server that lives where you do" does is spin up some AWS instance? No thank you.
- sneak 5y agoIf the TLS is terminated on the device and all it's using AWS for is a static ip and inbound port for email, that seems pretty harmless.
- gsreenivas 5y agoThat's exactly how it works
- ddalex 5y agoI feel that the internet is doing the full circle again, mediated by rent seekers - 1. all IPs are the same, email for everyone 2. residential IPs cannot into email cause spam 3. consumers don't get into IPs anymore cause CGNAT 3. AWS collects all the other available IPs and rents them out 4. consumers can now get IPs again, rented from AWS 5. ... 6. profit !
- stefan_ 5y agoThis is even missing a trick: unless its politically indicated, AWS does not ban its customers for spamming, high-rate crawling or other abuses, causing its IP ranges to be widely blocked. So now Amazon gets to market segment and sells a trusted email service, too!
- guerrilla 5y agoSpot on. Elsewhere in the thread gsreenivas mentions that the solution is too expensive for spammers and so they haven't had a problem with that yet, so we've actually moved to the original solution to spam: charge for sending e-mail*. The original proposal was to charge per email but an annual subscription would have the same effect in the right market (for now.) * Wasn't it Bill Gates who suggested that?
- ddalex 5y agoBut isn't this charging also for receiving?
- andrewaylett 5y ago> residential IPs cannot into email cause spam Strictly, that's dynamic IPs. The Venn diagram may almost be circular, but not quite. Part of the point being that it's much easier to block static IPs, while a spammer on a dynamic IP will evade any blocks when their IP address changes. My in-laws outbound email broke recently because, being on a dynamic IP, they'd been set up to send through their ISP's smarthost. Then they changed ISP :P.
- sprkwd 5y agoSo they’re still relying on big tech. Hmmm.