We did ship internationally, and Canada was one of the top international destinations for our products.

Thanks for the kind words!

Please read up on how email works before arriving at this conclusion.

Very cool - looking forward to seeing the new plan. I think this is a great solution for people who want to bring their own hardware.

When you consider that we include a domain registration and offsite encrypted backups, our subscription pricing is fairly comparable.

Yes, and you can. All services are available on the LAN on standard ports, even if the Helm server is not connected to the internet.

A workaround is to set up a desktop email client - allow it to fully sync, then use the desktop email client to export your email and import to another account.

Google rate limiting and restricting access to your own data is pretty awful. They are similarly terrible about OAuth permissions for 3rd parties - some companies are allowed to export data on behalf of customers while others are not.

Doing this via an email client is going to be really slow. Use something like fetchmail.

residential IP addresses are generally blacklisted by email services

yeah but so are AWS ips

Ive been using aws ip’s to send emails all the time Never had one flagged because of ip reputation.

Both using ses and directly sending emails via a aws vps

Wow. That honestly surprises me. I had been using Linode for my mail servers because of better IP rep

we have blocks of AWS IPs with no issues and we also have our own IP blocks

There are no hops for Helm customers. The TLS connections for their domains terminate on their Helm server.

That's exactly how it works

I 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 !

Spot 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?

But isn't this charging also for receiving?

> 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.

This 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!

Great questions: > - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware?

We use a verified boot process to ensure trusted bits are running on the HW.

> - Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be?

Not yet - but we are planning for customers to be able to run their own services in the future. We have quite a few updates to do before we get there. The upgrades happen OTA, seamlessly in the background. There is no root access on the machine locally or remotely.

how can an end user confirm this is infact true, and confirm that the updates are also free from any similar nasty issues.

can the user control the updates, including choosing when, what and if they happen.