Ask HN: Biographies recommendations – both Westerner and Non-westerner - <AUTHOR> Which biographies have you enjoyed reading that had somewhat an impact on you? Both westerner & non-westerner biographies are welcome.<p>Some of the topics I care about: - Philosophy - Entrepreneurship - Technology - Culture - History <comment><USER5> The Power Broker - the story of how an idealist turned into Darth Vader

The Years of Lyndon Johnson - the story of how LBJ rigged the 1948 election for Senate and rose to power

Here's an excerpt from an interview with the author of both books:

> During all these years I did come to understand stuff about power that I > wanted people to know. You read in every textbook that cliché: Power > corrupts. In my opinion, I've learned that power does not always corrupt. > Power can cleanse. When you're climbing to get power, you have to use > whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims. Because > if people knew your aims, it might make them not want to give you power. > Prime example: the southern senators who raised Lyndon Johnson up in the > Senate. They did that because he had made them believe that he felt the same > way they did about black people and segregation. But then when you get > power, you can do what you want. So power reveals. Do I want people to know > that? Yes.

<comment><USER6> I can't recommend The Power Broker more highly. It is one of my favorite books, and one of the books that I believe actually gave me new insights into how the world works.

I actually haven't read his LBJ series yet, and I'm really looking forward to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a meta-recommendation, I suggest checking out Five Books [1]. It's a website dedicated to bringing in experts and having them suggest five books that best represent their given fields. The archive of interviews on Five Books covers all the topics listed above and more.

[1] [https://fivebooks.com/](https://fivebooks.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> The Fish Who Ate The Whale. If you think Bezos and Zuckerberg are cunning & determined entrepreneurs Sam the Banana Man will blow your mind.

To give you a taste: His opponents (a large, well-funded and established competitor) stymied his attempt to get permission to build a bridge across a river. Undeterred, Sam built two piers. One from each side of the river. They told him he couldn't build a bridge. No one ever told him he couldn't build piers.

He was probably _too_ good at what he set out to do but he built an empire that still exists today out of bananas that were destined for garbage.

<comment><USER9> My favorite entrepreneurial book to recommend to others because so few have read or heard of it ... absolutely epic

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My Experiments with Truth - Mahatma Ghandhi Autobiography of a Yogi - <USER2> the last blue mountain - RM Lala (on JRD Tata) The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin O Manas ke Hans (Hindi biography of Ramkrishna Paramhans who was the guru of Shri Vivekanand) Narendra Modi - <USER3> mukhopadhyay Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel - kaushal goyal Steve Jobs - <USER4>

(While writing i realized that since last one year my outlook towards reading has shifted to politics like anything)

</comment><comment><USER11> I just finished reading Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Issacson and it was so good that i had to "reset" my HN password just to make this comment.

<comment><USER12> How good is it compared to Isaacson's Jobs or Einstein biographies?

<comment><USER11> I unfortunately haven't read either or those. Jobs biography became too famous that I didn't feel like reading it (^_^). I will pick Einstein at some point in the future. This was my first read from Issacson.

<comment><USER9> A book got too famous so you didn't feel like reading it? I don't understand that logic

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like biographies by Tracy Kidder:

"A truck full of money" About Paul English the founder of Kyak.com. 'One mans quest to recover from great success"

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/A-Truck-Full-of- Mo...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/A-Truck-Full-of-Money-by- Tracy-Kidder-9239645.php)

Another Tracy Kidder biography is "Mountains beyond Moutains" this book traces the life of physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_Beyond_Mountains](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_Beyond_Mountains)

It isn't really a biography, but soul of a new machine is really interesting story about 80s computer companies. He won a pulizer for it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine)

</comment><comment><USER14> Stillness Flowing Biography of Ajahn Chah [https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/617-stillness- flowing](https://www.abhayagiri.org/books/617-stillness-flowing)

He is a Thai Buddhist monk, who is responsible for introducing mindfulness/insight mediation to the west.

</comment><comment><USER15> _Both biography and autobiography_

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

My Life and Work by Henry Ford

My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla by Ben Johnston and Nikola Tesla

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin by Charles Darwin

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

</comment><comment><USER16> Some autobiographical writings:

T. E. Lawrence: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mint_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mint_\(book\))

Władysław Szpilman: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_(memoir)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pianist_\(memoir\))

Primo Levi: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Is_a_Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_This_Is_a_Man)

</comment><comment><USER17> I have a guilty pleasure of reading biographies of people who are moderately famous/wealthy/successful and are talking themselves up, as I think they reveal interesting things about the human condition and ambition. On that note I enjoyed "Time to Make the Donuts" and "Money Monster", both on entrepreneurship.

I go back to some greats like Benjamin Franklin as well, but the books on the margin lacking polish can be more interesting.

</comment><comment><USER18> _Genius_ by James Gleick is the best biography I've ever read. It's about the life of Richard Feynman.

Gleick's _Isaac Newton_ is also fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://meganmarshallauthor.com/books_peabodysisters.shtml](http://meganmarshallauthor.com/books_peabodysisters.shtml) \- since I live in Boston area, especially interesting to hearabout both how the area has changed culturally and physically, and to learn about people whose homes I have visited on tours of historic homes.

[https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Yukichi- Fukuzawa/dp/023...](https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Yukichi- Fukuzawa/dp/023113987X) \- great perspective on a period of massive intellectual/cutural/political change in Japan

[https://www.amazon.com/Annie-Besant-Lives-Modern- Women/dp/01...](https://www.amazon.com/Annie-Besant-Lives-Modern- Women/dp/0140086633/) \- interesting to see change and continuity in the life of someone extremely capable and influential

<comment><USER20> Any other recommendation of Japan's books in English.

<comment><USER21> A fictionalized biography to be sure, but I highly recommend Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa: [https://www.amazon.com/Musashi-Epic-Novel-Samurai- Era/dp/156...](https://www.amazon.com/Musashi-Epic-Novel-Samurai- Era/dp/156836427X) about the famous samurai. It reads like a fantasy novel.

Also Taiko by the same author is a fictionalized version of the 3 kingdoms period, told from an interesting perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Jungle Soldier - story of Freddie Spencer Chapman (like Lawrence of Arabia, but even better story)

Left to Tell - Immaculée Ilibagiza's life, story of survival of the Rwandan Genocide and a tale of how to live on after such tragedy and how to forgive the unforgiveable.

Longitude - essentially a biography of John Harrison, the man who solved the longitude problem (and probably thereby made the success of the British Empire)

X, Y & Z - a brilliant biography of all the French, English and Polish codebreakers of WW2

Agent Zigzag - the story of the man who betrayed everyone and could possibly have killed Hitler if he was allowed

William Pitt the Younger (Robin Reilly) - possibly one of the most difficult periods in British History saw one of the best British Prime Ministers to date

Kukuczka - the story of how he became one of the world's most impressive climbers despite communist oppression

The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History - a highly interesting book that brings the necessary documents to the table to help understand a topic that is often treated in a very facile way

Ivan III and the Unification of Russia - a great book for understanding the basis on which Russia was built

Xenophon's Anabasis - what a load of fun. How to lead a failed army back home and gorge on mad honey

</comment><comment><USER23> Here are some that I've enjoyed reading:

Steve Martin - Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Kevin Mitnick - Ghost In The Wires

Kenneth Roman - The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising

Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs

Alan Deutschman - The Second Coming of Steve Jobs

James Wallace - Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

Alice Schroeder - The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Richard Branson - Losing My Virginity

</comment><comment><USER24> Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson A mathematician's apology by G.H Hardy My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen Hamilton by Ron Chernow

</comment><comment><USER25> _Limonov_ by Emmanuel Carrère is a sensitive and conflicting portrait of an extraordinary Russian (who's still alive).

</comment><comment><USER26> The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo

Born Standing Up (Steve Martin's autobiography)

</comment><comment><USER27> Quickly read: The "Personal Narrative" sections of Richard Gabriel's _Patterns of Software_ , available at [https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf](https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER28> Shoe dog by Phil Knight, Nike Founder.

Best book on entrepreneurship journey, I have ever read.

The book is a heartfelt autobiography.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wright Brothers by David McCullough Bonanza King: John McKay by Gregory Crouch Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance My Life as a Goddess by Guy Branum Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

The last two are especially good as audiobook autobiographies read by the author.

</comment><comment><USER30> All of the Walter Isaacson biographies are fantastic.

To understand how modern digital ecosystem came to be I cannot think of a better combination than Isaacson's "Innovators" and "The Dream Machine" by Waldrop.

<comment><USER24> His Leonardo biography is mediocre at best. It may read smoothly but he lacks a good grasp of the subject matter. Instead, Leonardo is like an earlier Steve Jobs of some kind.

<comment><USER26> I've enjoyed some of Walter Isaacson's books but always worried an internet- intellectual would roast me for that.

I think those biographies are more pop than his fans like to think and more academic than his detractors might imagine.

<comment><USER30> I don't think there is anything wrong in 'pop' when the work is intended to be popular. I expect the biographer to verify her sources but as a reader I'm not going to go out (generally) to verify them.

Things that happened, happened. Most of all when reading popular biographies I want to be introduced to real things that happened, and if some of that draws my interest, I can then dig in to more academic sources.

The popular biographies offer the '100 feet' view over their subject and the society in which they lived in, and should not be disparaged if they succeed in doing that in a readable and entertaining manner.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I just think 'pop' is a good word to take down something seen as a comprehensive work when it's more of a '100 foot overview.'

That's a rare thing, though. The adjective should probably be used neutrally way more often than derogatorily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> May sound like a cliche but Mahatma Gandhi's "My experiment with Truth." is a good read to get an idea of the philosophy of a major percentage of world population throughout the history.

</comment><comment><USER32> A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.

Walter Isaacson books

</comment><comment><USER33> I enjoyed iWoz, the autobiography of Steve Wozniak about how Apple Inc. got started. A little known fact is that Woz still works for Apple doing promotional stuff for the company.

</comment><comment><USER34> Two worthwhile autobiographies - Phil Knight's "Shoe Dog" (about the growth of Nike) and Kay Graham's "Personal History" (about the Washington Post)

</comment><comment><USER35> The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel ; it's impossible to understand how he figured out the amazing things he did. His story is a tragedy.

Locke: A biography by Roger Woolhouse ; the father of classical liberalism in a time of upheaval in England, interactions with the king, banishment to Holland, promoted religious toleration

The Double Helix: James Watson; scientific discovery in 1950s Cambridge, the thrill of the race to be first, controversy with Rosalind Franklin

The Caro books on Lyndon Johnson; insight into the ugly guts of politics, what it takes to win & the course of mid-20th century American history

The Mark Levison book on the Beatles is amazing - the only volume he has finished takes ~700 pages to get to the release of their first single. Arguably the most important cultural phenomenon of the 20th century.

Andrew Hodge's biography of Alan Turing

</comment><comment><USER36> I really loved "My wicked, wicked ways" about the live of Errol Flynn.

If even half of it is true, he had enough adventures for a lot of movies. Also such a fun read.

</comment><comment><USER37> Any biographical recommendations on Srinivasa Ramanujan?

<comment><USER35> I really enjoyed the Man who knew Infinity by Kanigel. Seemed to capture the flavor of Cambridge at the time. It's a movie too, but I haven't seen it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman

</comment><comment><USER39> It doesnt fit into your categories - but comedian Billy Connolly's "Made In Scotland" autobiography is really good

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now I have a large list of biographies to read! thanks a lot to everyone's recommendation I really appreciate it! :)

</comment><comment><USER20> My Life and Work - Henry Ford

A true engineer at heart. His comeback in life is very similar to that of Steve Jobs. Man was a true genius.

</comment><comment><USER40> Here's another vote for Ben Franklin's autobiography. It's full of remarkably good advice and aged very well.

</comment><comment><USER41> Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance.

Hands down one of the most inspiring and motivating biographies I've read.

<comment><USER9> Agreed - after reading this one I really stepped up my reading game (Audible helps a lot!) and it's helped my creativity and problem solving a lot :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The Last Lion - a multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill, by William Manchester.

</comment><comment><USER43> Anything by Walter Isaacson.

Memoirs of Jacques Casanova

Autobiography of Benvenuto Cillini

</comment><comment><USER44> Last train to Memphis - Peter Guralnick (Elvis)

</comment><comment><USER45> The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin

</comment><comment><USER46> Benjamin Franklinis

</comment><comment><USER47> The Biography of Prophet Muhammad: [https://www.amazon.com/Ar-Raheeq-Al- Makhtum-Sealed-Nectar-Bi...](https://www.amazon.com/Ar-Raheeq-Al-Makhtum- Sealed-Nectar-Biography/dp/1591440718)

Learning the ups & downs of a human, who tried to change the world, and delivered the religion of Islam.

</comment><comment><USER48> Irena Sendler: Mother of the Children of the Holocaust

</comment><comment><USER49> "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War"

[https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who- Changed/dp/031...](https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who- Changed/dp/0316796883)

</comment><comment><USER50> "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer"

A lot about American and international politics during the Manhattan Project that is very insightful.

</comment><comment><USER51> The Singapore Story - Lee Kuan Yew

Biography of Malcolm X

Deng Xiaopeng and the Transformation of China

The Power Broker</comment>


Helm: Personal Email Server - <AUTHOR> https://thehelm.com <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting product with great potential. Their website doesn't seem to address my two main concerns:

1\. How do they ensure high, non-spam delivery rates to the main email services like Gmail, Fastmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft?

2\. How would the product work in case Helm the company/service goes away (or even just service outage)? Can the device work on its own without the need for their web service (perhaps with lower delivery rate/higher spam score)?

They claim:

>> We've designed your Helm to ensure as little information about you as possible is communicated back to us. That's why the only account you create is directly with your server, not with us, and why only encrypted data passes through our servers.

But how does that work with sending emails? (Please excuse my ignorance on this matter.)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern. It has been a real struggle for me despite having a server I own in a rack with net-neighbors I know.

Another big one for me is the failure modes. What do I do when my home connection is down? How about when my connection is down and I'm traveling? What happens when the hardware fails? How about when the hardware fails 5 years from now?

Having email just down for a couple days while you wait for new hardware to would be a very bad experience.

<comment><USER3> So if they route everything through the same set of EC2 instances, that might actually take care of the SPAM issue. I run my own e-mail server and have run into that same issue of not being able to send to gmail/microsoft addresses (unless I contact the person via Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. and tell them to check their spam folder):

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft- made...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email- unreliable/)

The way most of these providers deal with spam is they slowly white-list IP addresses. When a company like Mailchip or Mailgun spin up a new server, it's always in a large subnet range they've purchased and they slowly start sending low priority e-mail through it to existing/known receivers and throttle it up to full speed.

If you're running a personal server that sends like 5 or 6 e-mails a days, well that's an issue.

The big players make it difficult to run a small personal server, but running a dedicated business or corporate server that sends 100s of e-mails per day is typically fine once it's well established.

You know what would be a better product? A relay SMTP server that works with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Fastmail et. al. to pump e-mail from personal servers and ensures it won't get caught in spam filters.

<comment><USER4> "You know what would be a better product? A relay SMTP server that works with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Fastmail et. al. to pump e-mail from personal servers and ensures it won't get caught in spam filters."

That's basically Sendgrid or Mailgun or even Fastmail itself. They can all relay SMTP for arbitrary domains.

<comment> ryan-c It's actually a totally different product vs Sendgrid/Mailgun/etc.

Such a product would need to have a ToS that states it can only be used for low volume personal and business correspondence, and have per-account rate limiting to enforce that. Doing it this way is necessary to avoid having mail treated as bulk.

I've tried relaying through mailgun to get mail to outlook.com, it does not work.

<comment><USER5> Rate-limiting would be interesting. If the cost of the service was specifically high enough to be unscalable. Like, $10 per month and you can send 200 emails per day. That's expensive compared to anything else but fine for personal use.

<comment><USER6> fastmail already is available for $10 per month, so I guess problem solved?

<comment> ryan-c Do they handle a send-only smarthost configuration that allows arbitrary from addresses within a domain?

<comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read the whole tech page and some of the comments here. I might be willing to pay for this service, but not in its current form. I wouldn't want to spend 500USD on a proprietary hardware in addition to paying a subscription fee. What needs to happen to convince me to pay:

Open up the hardware component as a platform for anyone to extend (allowing direct ssh, or using my own hardware). It's fine to not open source the email server code. But I would like to utilize the hardware to do other things, like file storage, etc. Instead of waiting for your company to build other features, I would rather have community contributed (preferably open source) plugins that integrates with your ecosystem and runs on the hardware.

<comment><USER8> This is extremely valuable feedback and worth strongly considering.

When the iPhone came out, it didn't support apps - just built-in features like Mail and Mobile Safari. I agree with you that an app store for Helm could be valuable.

<comment><USER9> This could be especially valuable as a way to build email apps for enterprise. Especially if there were a good API that returned email data in JMAP format.

I know Nylas tries to do this, but their model doesn't really work for me.

<comment><USER10> Why JMAP over something universal like JSON?

<comment><USER9> JMAP returns data in JSON, but with a standardized schema. It's better than the current status quo, where each email provider returns API data in JSON but using their own schema, meaning you need to build different endpoints and methods to work with each email provider. The spec is about to be finalized, so there is no reason why email providers who haven't yet released an API shouldn't be using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't most ISPs ban residential accounts from running something like this?

Comcast terms:

> use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises > that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your > Premises local area network ("Premises LAN"), also commonly referred to as > public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers > include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy > services and servers

Verizon terms:

> You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may > establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any > type of server.

AT&T terms:

> using such account for the purpose of operating a server of any type;

Sources:

[https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspe...](https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspeedinternetaup)

[https://www.verizon.com/about/terms-conditions/verizon- onlin...](https://www.verizon.com/about/terms-conditions/verizon-online)

[https://www.att.com/legal/terms.aup.html](https://www.att.com/legal/terms.aup.html)

<comment><USER12> hey jawns, great question. I'm Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm. To answer your question, ISPs block port 25 and email service providers typically reject emails coming from residential IP blocks.

To build a plug and play solution, we knew that our server could not require listening for inbound connections on a residential internet connection. So we set about looking into how we could route traffic to and from a home server but we needed to do this in a way that prevented us from being able to spy on traffic. We investigated solutions like sshuttle and eventually settled on the combination of a simple iptables configuration combined with a VPN connection. Helm establishes an outbound VPN connection to a dedicated EC2 instance with an iptables configuration that routes packets to and from the connected Helm server. The EC2 instance also has a static IP address associated with it.

It's important to stop here and explain that the only way this architecture is viable while adhering to our design tenet of knowing as little about our customers as possible is because of the Let's Encrypt project. Every Helm server has a unique domain associated with it and trusted certificates for that domain are fetched from Let's Encrypt. We strive to ensure that all inbound and outbound traffic routed through the EC2 instance is using TLS with these certificates from Let's Encrypt. This way, our EC2 instance is effectively just an extra hop on the Internet.

I hope that answers your question, let me know!

<comment><USER13> I thought that sending email from EC2 instance was not allowed and only option was using their SES service.

<comment><USER14> You can send email from an EC2 instance but good luck getting anyone to accept it. A lot of email providers block EC2 wholesale, or if they do accept it you are going to have to have a long standing reputation.

<comment><USER15> What do you mean by blocking "wholesale"? I started hosting an email server in EC2 and the worst I've had is my emails going to a spam folder if that person hasn't received an email from my address yet (and never after they've marked me as not being spam). That happened surprisingly rarely and didn't feel like much worse than I would get by just sending people email from gmail with an address they don't know. I don't think things are as bas as you make them out to be.

edit: I guess I should be clear that I have an elastic IP (which is free) and setup reverse DNS and DKIM and SPF, but I think those are fairly standard now a days (I don't know honestly I've only run an email server for a few months).

<comment><USER14> It depends on whom you send to. Like ironically I sent an abuse complaint to Verizon for a spammer and got rejected because they blocked all of Digital Ocean's IP space. Yahoo was particularly difficult too sending me a response saying they won't take my mail immediately on a single email to my brother. I had to go through a lot to get that fixed. Again this was due to being on cloud provider IP space.

GMail is more reasonable with perhaps being spam filtered but never blocked outright. I have also been blocked by government labs and academic institutions. I also have complied with RDNS, DKIM, SPF and got a top score on mx toolbox. Now that I have been up for a while I have had less issues besides with the ones that block cloud provider spaces.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft is the toughest one. Fortunately, I don't have friends that use outlook.com or w/e

<comment><USER17> Does your email get blocked if it is sent to a business on O365?

<comment><USER16> haven't tried in a while. It can, they dont' follow all the rules and do a little more blocking in the interest of their users or based off a ML spam detection or something.

Some things that should be delivered are not. I'd have to dig back into this to see what the exact issue is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never understand why people think having your files physically in their homes is somehow more secure than a data center.

\- You run the risk of hardware failure, which would take days to recover. When your warranty expires, it'd cost you, too.

\- Disk failure may lose all your data.

\- Fire, theft, or hurricanes may destroy it.

\- You still give access to your data to a company, which controls software updates and the EC2 proxy (in this case).

\- Many home ISPs have shitty upload connectivity, so your email won't work that well on the go.

\- Internet and power outages mean you won't send or receive any email.

\- You lose the knowledge email providers get from scale, including ever- evolving spam filters, and a guaranteed clean outgoing IP.

If you really want to control your data, just spin up something like ownCloud (not sure if that's the best solution, just an example). Companies like DigitalOcean make it as simple as point and click.

<comment><USER8> I'm the first and biggest investor in Helm and I'm on the board. I created email-based Posterous previously (YC funded) and was a YC partner for 5 years. I funded this team because they're high integrity software engineers first, and we built this out of need— a company like this needs to exist because for this to work, you need both great user experience as well as great software.

Helm actually solves this exactly - they already have continuity of service coming in the pipeline, and the product as-it-ships will support encrypted backup/restore out of box, similar to how your iPhone supports iCloud backup.

I've run my own mail servers for Posterous before and it was probably 2 to 10 hours a month of maintenance, software updates, etc. And that's not something normals can do.

The company itself is run by folks who are committed to running this as a sustainable long term business that takes are of its customers and is super responsive to the community. As a board member I promise you we'll do that.

<comment><USER19> If I can trust someone to do off-site cloud backups of my e-mail, why can't I trust the same person to run a Fastmail-like service so I don't have to have a $500 server in my house to get e-mail?

<comment><USER8> Because with Helm only you hold the encryption keys.

<comment><USER19> But that's completely orthogonal to owning a piece of hardware. You could run a managed cloud e-mail service where only the users hold the encryption keys, too. How is this a hardware problem?

<comment><USER20> > You could run a managed cloud e-mail service where only the users hold the > encryption keys, too. How is this a hardware problem?

This is the key question, in my mind. There's only one reason I'd want to own the hardware—to manage/add/create my own services and handle my own backups because I don't trust a company's involvement in these[0].

If this is so tightly controlled that I can't add my own services and I can't restore a backup without Helm's involvement, why do I even want the hardware?

[0] I don't mean that I don't trust them in a privacy sense. I mean that I don't trust them to make sure the backups are actually working and able to be decrypted and restored. Or be able to be restored without _their_ software/hardware. There doesn't seem to be any transparency wrt/ these concerns.

<comment><USER8> This is a valuable and useful criticism and we're going to talk about this at our next board meeting.

How do you know who to trust? You surely have to trust someone. It feels generally true that we can trust Apple since we pay them for hardware and their ongoing business interest is in protecting their revenue streams through their hardware and iOS app store, which means you are aligned.

Generally for Helm that's a good case. That's why we charge money for this hardware and software: it aligns interest.

Free cloud services are not truly free and that's what most people seem to be OK with... but not all people.

This is the classic trade-off. Open source software you can read the code but usability suffers. For the people on HN, most people can run their own servers, but for normal people that's not an option.

Apple has managed to create a computing environment that is highly usable for normal people. This is what Helm is trying to do too.

<comment><USER20> So, we're in agreement that this sort of thing should 1) be paid for, 2) not readable by the provider, and 3) maintenance-free for the user.

I still don't understand why this is a _hardware_ play. There are advantages to owning the hardware but _none_ of those advantages seem to apply here.

The hardware feels like a bit of an albatross.

<comment><USER21> How could it NOT be a hardware play? Then how else can you verify and trust that you know what code is running in some datacenter in who knows where?

<comment><USER20> It doesn't matter what code is running server side, as long as decryption happens client side and the keys are never transmitted to the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 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).

<comment><USER12> 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 firstname.lastname@example.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.

<comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To me there are these risks to e-mail:

1\. e-mail address loss (domain loss, service termination if you don't own the domain, ...)

2\. email service loss (server goes down, ...)

3\. delivery mechanism compromise (someone gets to read future messages, can be used to hijack online accounts)

4\. sending mechanism compromise (partial impersonation, etc.)

5\. e-mail archive compromise (someone gets to read old messages)

6\. archive loss

You have to think hard about each point:

\- how it can happen,

\- how would you detect it,

\- what it could lead to,

and then prepare for those circumstances via preventive measures, and by having a plan for when it happens.

For example if you register your domains under an account where email that was used for registration comes from one of those domains 3. can easily lead to 1. and you're hosed. You have to have way to restore 2. without access to e-mail addresses that will not work while 2. is happening. You will most probably have no way of detecting 3./4\. before bad things start happening. etc. etc.

E-mail is not really something to fuck with, because of how important it is for authentication on the web.

Helm website doesn't work for me, but if you're thinking about an _easy_ way to have a _personal_ email server, and don't have experience, be careful.

</comment><comment><USER24> So this is bikeshed territory but what with the shape of the "box"? You can't stack anything on it and it seems to take much more room than necessary that way.

Reading the (mouse hijacking) technology page I see:

>Helm is a high-performance server with capabilities normally found in larger, business-class hardware. To accomplish this performance in a smaller (and quieter) form factor, Helm has been engineered to dissipate heat through its aluminum base.

Is that the reason behind the design? Does it mean it's fully passive cooling? Also is it really necessary to have that much cooling in the first place? An email server doesn't need that much juice normally, especially for a small handful of users.

<comment><USER8> The design actually allows for server stacking when you need more compute or storage. It does fully passive cooling with no fan.

<comment><USER25> Are there third parties selling servers with this form factor? Or would we be locked into Helm when we need more compute or storage?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you feel like doing this yourself, get something like a Raspberry Pi 3 (or better, like the Asus Tinker Board) and use sovereign (from github) to automatically install your own mail server/owncloud on it.

Then get a dirt cheap VPS (less than $15/yr) from lowendbox/lowendtalk and run a OpenVPN tunnel.

So what's the advantage of having this at home instead of an ISP? For one, backup and restore is fast and easy. You can use your NAS that's at home. You may want to have an additional offline backup in case your home network gets completely compromised. A box at home is also more difficult to tamper with. If you're paranoid, put it into a tamper resistant box.

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately reputation management is a requirement nowadays for all senders of MTA. And it's an ongoing hassle.

Helm promises to handle this in a way that doesn't let them read transmitted mails. You still have to trust them ultimately, but the stakes are higher.

<comment><USER28> The only Helm EC2 instance I've seen listens on 587 and 993, which seems incongruent with that promise.

<comment><USER12> You missed some other ports including 25.

<comment><USER28> That wasn't intended as a complete list? Elsewhere I also mentioned the mystery HTTP services on something like 8443 (but that's to wit).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> $99/year? They are targeting an extremely small market. I can get Fastmail for a fraction of that amount, and I don't see much of an advantage with this - and I'm one of the few willing to pay for something I get elsewhere for free.

<comment><USER30> I mean, "a fraction" is "half" in this case, which is actually pretty close to par in my mind. And that's what I pay for one address for a year; so if this is more addresses and more domains at better scaling prices, that's quite interesting.

<comment><USER31> Fastmail lets you use all the domains you want with one account, it just routes the messages to a different folder.

Also, remember the $99 per year is AFTER shelling out $500 for the device.

<comment><USER32> Until the device fails and you need to replace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm having a hard time understanding who would buy this. Non-techies aren't looking for a solution to this problem. And, the moment you mention encryption keys in your marketing you've lost them.

For $499 and $99/yr (!!), I don't think you'll convince techies this a worthwhile product either. Maybe the ultra paranoid users. But, in my experience those are also the people who can build their own solution.

</comment><comment><USER34> Seems like an amazing solution for really a non-existent problem. The average consumer doesn't bother with his email privacy if he had other online solution would have been much more popular. The more technical consumer will probably would prefer to run something open source on his own server. So I wonder who is willing to buy and pay for this kind of solution.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have to point out that while their marketing copy claims that they want to know "as little as possible" about their customers, they have Segment's JavaScript tag on thehelm.com

Do you know what Segment does? It makes it easy to send data anywhere -> [https://segment.com/catalog](https://segment.com/catalog)

<comment> Anthony-G Also, no actual content appears on the page without allowing third-party JavaScript. Even though I'm interested in hearing about new mail services, I chose to close the tab rather than spend time figuring out which of the 17 third-party domains I should white-list in order to see some text.

I doubt I'm the only one who made this choice. For some of us, content is still the reason we use a web browser; that includes those of us who value privacy and minimising the amount of arbitrary code we run on our devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> They're "solving" the residential ISP email blacklist issue by offering an IPSEC VPN with static addresses they control:

> Helm just works with your home network—no configuration needed. Helm > connects securely to a unique gateway, which is assigned a static IP address > so Helm is reachable by other mail servers and secure TLS sessions can be > established.

A nice approach, but it does sort of chip away at the decentralisation claim that's at the core of their messaging.

<comment><USER37> I wonder if they check that the IP addrs they use are in good standing with the large mail receivers or if they somehow pre-warm the IP with "good" email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> On the homepage

> Do you know where your email is?

You show, Google, NSA, etc... but doesn't this service route email through your own servers to get to the box in my home? what makes your servers more secure than Google's at handling the emails? If I have to trust you to route the emails, I might as well just use something like Fastmail that hosts them too.

More crucially, what can I do with the box if I ever stop paying you? or you go under, etc.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is my perspective alone and isn't meant to sway anyone's opinion, this is just my experience as it's been.

Having owned and run my own mail servers myself for some 10 years, I'll tell you something for nothing. Owning your own mail server is not something that comes for free. At least, it wasn't for me.

Unless your product has brought something that's drastically different in terms of software, security and spam maintenance, it's too much of a pain in the ass for a non-technical person to manage. Heck, I'm about as technical as they come. I ran plenty of different kinds of mail servers in those ten years. The effort and inconvenience it caused in that time just wasn't worth it to me any more.

Having to stress out every time I moved, needing to make sure my internet wasn't shut off until I left the premises and making sure it was already on at the new premises before I could move anything, always being the guy on call if my mail server went down.

Then came Cloud and I no longer had to worry about physical hardware ownership and maintenance. I no longer had to worry about if my internet at home was working. The opportunity to move my mail server to a VM, and then hosted Exchange and now Office 365. This has offered me so much mental freedom, I don't think I could go back.

The added stress wasn't worth the extra flexibility and security in my mind. All my email is now handled by Microsoft. Sure it costs me a little money each month, but I've got the peace of mind that their security team is on it and while I'm pretty security savvy, I've got nothing on their security team. In addition, I'm not the guy on call when everything falls to pieces.

I realize that most technical people won't have my perspective on this, but it's definitely something you should think about.

<comment><USER8> Helm was built specifically for you. I know because I had to run dozens of mail servers myself for email-to-blog platform Posterous, my startup 10 years ago. It was terrible.

I've been up and running with Helm for the past month on my garrytan.com email domain and it's been zero maintenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is an interesting project. I've been following FreedomBox for ages hoping it would end up as a good way to do this, but development has been slow. I do have some questions about the technical details:

1) Is email access provided through the Helm App, SMTP/IMAP, or is there a webmail interface as well? Can you use this device without a smartphone?

2) Which Linux distro is this based on?

3) What file system is used? Is it something like ZFS or BTRFS, which could protect against corruption? Since there seems to be only one drive, I assume there is no RAID-like redundancy included to protect against drive failure?

4) Where are the encrypted backups stored? What is the procedure for recovering them? I expect that the backup recovery keys are also stored offline on the flash drive?

5) How are software updates performed? Are they pushed from a managed system that you control, or does the device itself pull updates automatically on a schedule? How long will you guarantee software updates for? If you stop providing them, or are slow to patch a vulnerability, is there any way for the user to patch the device themselves? Local SSH access perhaps?

Lastly, a comment, please consider not overriding the scroll behaviour on your website. It may look slick when it works, but when it doesn't (as it doesn't on my Firefox), it totally breaks the website. In the case of your technology page, it is super-annoying, since the details I want are at the bottom, and I'm forced to watch the slideshow before I can see them.

<comment><USER41> How about alternatives that are completely open [https://www.kinguardproject.org/](https://www.kinguardproject.org/) ? As mentioned in other comments, having all the sources provides the possibility to review/recreate/modify the code to see what is really going on.

Disclaimer, I'm engaged in The Kinguard Project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm sorry, but I'm pessimistic about this. 99% of people just don't care about privacy, and those who do would probably prefer to set up their self-hosted email by themselves.

I really hope to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER43> It's not even that. It's that the flipside of decentralization or even federation is SPAM. How do you prevent getting SPAM from people you don't know, while at the same time having others accept YOUR emails?

That's why today ANTISPAM on the net has all but shut down the option of having email outside the big boys or edu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This looks pretty cool. Very happy to see email space still being explored.

Somewhat off topic, but another nice project named Helm is the Helm Synth by Matt Tytel, which is open source and sounds pretty freakin good!

[https://tytel.org/helm/](https://tytel.org/helm/)

<comment><USER45> For devops/ops/cloud folks, Helm the k8s package manager will be the first thing that comes to mind.

[https://github.com/helm/helm](https://github.com/helm/helm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> That's a heck of a name conflict with [https://helm.sh/](https://helm.sh/) although I suppose the target audiences are fairly different.

</comment><comment><USER47> Try [https://mailinabox.email](https://mailinabox.email)

It's rad, does all of the DNS/SSL/DKIM foo necessary to make your email fully deliverable, includes contacts and calendar sync, is multi-user, multi-domain, etc.

<comment><USER47> Or, if you want something a bit more, well, everything and the kitchen sink: [https://yunohost.org](https://yunohost.org)

<comment><USER47> Or Homebox: [https://github.com/progmaticltd/homebox](https://github.com/progmaticltd/homebox)

Ansible, yaml config, I _think_ only a single domain.

<comment><USER48> Now _this_ is interesting... Appreciate it

<comment><USER49> Or [https://www.iredmail.org/](https://www.iredmail.org/) or [https://cloudron.io](https://cloudron.io) and [https://mailcow.email/](https://mailcow.email/)

<comment><USER47> Cloudron.io is closed source and hosted, I believe.

Mailcow only does smtp and pop/imap, no dns, CardDAV and CalDAV.

Iredmail looks neat!

Thanks!

<comment><USER49> It's not hosted - you install it on your server. [https://cloudron.io/get.html](https://cloudron.io/get.html). Why is closed source an issue? gmail, helm etc are all closed...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The hardware looks slick, but are my emails going to bounce when my not commercial comcast/spectrum/at&t/whoever has a maintenance outage? I'm not sure it's too useful to bring that out of the datacenter and into my house...

<comment><USER12> Hey there, I'm Giri Sreenivas, co-founder of Helm. Glad you like the hardware! Good question on email bounces. As Arubis mentioned, email has retry built in and most servers default to retrying for 48-72 hours.

<comment><USER51> This answer implies that you have no idea what the problem is, which doesn't bode well.

The problem is that the major email hosts send to the spam folder any emails from IP addresses they don't explicitly trust.

My solution to this is just to ignore it and tell people if they want to receive my email they should work out how, as the problem is on their end not mine.

But lots of your customers won't like that answer.

<comment><USER12> hi jstanley - I was answering the question about retry when there's a service outage. Did you interpret the question differently?

<comment><USER51> Sorry! Yes, I thought you were answering a question about dealing with bounces in general. My mistake!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This looks really interesting, but I'm disappointed that you apparently _need_ a subscription to their DDNS-like service.

In a lot of cases, users may be paying for a static IP from their ISPs (or even have one for free, by default), or they may be running their own DDNS via a cloud instance already. This does nothing but add a $100/year fee for something that is exceptionally non-reusable and narrowly-scoped.

<comment><USER53> I host my email on a vps for $2.50/month. At that price there is really no reason to do it at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm not usually one to theorize spying, but I'm gonna call it here: I'm betting that "remote administrative access" is found between the EC2 instance and the at-home box.

My first thought in seeing gsreenivas' discussion about the VPN/iptables/EC2 is that the physical box at home makes it feel more secure than an EC2 solution, but I'm not sure that is actually the case.

<comment><USER12> there is no remote administrative access from the EC2 instance or anywhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Related story just popped up on Bloomberg: A majority of board members are still using personal email accounts to share corporate information

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/dusty- pro...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/dusty-prodigy- accounts-lost-tablets-put-company-secrets-at-risk)

<comment><USER56> How do you think I make my money at my job?

Tag a few high level corp accounts and play the market as deals are closed over gmail accounts.

+17% on Twilio buying Sendmail just this month :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Had a pleasure of setting up and running a personal mail server before, and honestly, unless you are highly technical and enjoy doing that, a consumer solution is nice to have. It's not just the original setup that takes a long time, it's configuration and maintenance, software updates, mail delivery hacks... Basically if you've ever wanted your own mail server, Helm should be it.

</comment><comment><USER48> You mention that you use a hardened Linux OS, but you don't discuss any of the other opensource software that you use. While you technically only have to distribute the sources to the people that receive your hardware, it would be nice to know these kinds of things before purchasing. This is a niche market you're marketing to that has a history of researching these kinds of things.

Are you using a custom distro or one of the off the shelf ones? What webserver (presumably there is one) is running on this? MTA? What're you using for backups? Is this just a ownCloud running under the hood with a tunnel to AWS and small proprietary layer on top?

Along different lines, how to do the backups work? Are they just stored on the device (what happens when its drive dies)? If not where are they stored and how much manual intervention is required. If your company goes under can I use any opensource software to decrypt the backups and access my emails?

Edit: With the list of sources in hand I can answer a lot of the questions I posited. So for others interested:

Distro: Still unknown, but see additional interesting tidbits.

Webserver: Neither nginx or apache are present. If I had to guess its using golang's net code to run any webserver / API that is present

MTA: postfix, dovecot, opendkim, opendmarc, spamassassin (might be more components I missed)

ownCloud: Doesn't appear so

backup software: Duplicity

backup location / process: Unknown

Interesting other tidbits:

OpenVPN is present, and so is ipsec-tools/strongswan. So they might be using either IPSec, OpenVPN or a combination of both for the tunnels. They could just be distribution defaults.

It's running docker, I'm guessing they're using some form of container image sync update system rather than a proper package manager.

It contains a fully developer toolchain, so presumably this is a full distribution rather than a minimized / custom one.

Based on the versions it appears the ARM processor is a QorIQ variant which is an ARM evolution of the PowerPC architecture.

Contains the libatomic libraries, so perhaps this is running on Fedora Atomic as an underlying OS? Would explain the presence of docker and give an idea how they're providing updates.

Appears to have a wifi chip (I couldn't find any information about connectivity on their site). Specifically it seems to be using a Qualcomm ath10k chip.

<comment><USER12> Hi TrueDuality - Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm here.

We will be publishing more details to answer your questions in depth in a series of coming posts. I'll give you some quick answers right now.

We use Yocto to spin our own Linux build. Key projects we utilize: OpenLDAP Postfix Dovecot Darwin Calendar and Contacts Certbot OpenDMARC OpenDKIM OpenSSL Python SPF Policy Sieve SpamAssassin Duplicity StrongSwan Docker

We're using duplicity for backups. So you can use it to decrypt backups as you will have the keys as well. Backups are stored on a service we run using S3 and will always be accessible for the user even if something happens to the company.

<comment><USER32> I would like to see the option for backups to be held on you own own cloud account of choice. I am in Canada and I use a Canadian cloud company called sync.com for my secured data storage knowing it will not be stored in the US.

The price point is also a bit high for a Canadian Customer, so I like the idea but a bit too pricey for North of the boarder after currency exchange.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the feedback - we will take this into consideration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> So. The case is interesting maybe. But 500usd for a $pi with a 30usd ssd? And then 99usd/yr to route mail via a t2 nano on 1yr free tier? So in a year's time the relay service will stop? Or before that the ec2 instance will go down but then that means enough helms have been sold... I could be wrong....

</comment><comment><USER59> So this is a bet that people will value their email privacy at $99/year. The last time I went from not paying for something to paying for it was when I started paying for streaming services instead of downloading media. The cost difference was around the same (although $10/mo. feels cheaper than $99/yr), but the benefits feel a lot stronger -- say instead of waiting for a download to finish over the next hour, I can start watching content immediately. Even as a privacy minded person (no social media accounts, etc.), I don't see myself or a big market subscribing to this. The confidence factor is also pretty important since I'm not going to subscribe to a service that I feel has a high chance of shutting down in the next couple of years and possibly suffer email interruptions / data loss.

</comment><comment><USER60> I want nothing to do with the shit-sandwich that is hosting mail, and have utmost respect for those of you that can.

But I would _love_ a small server box that can be simply stacked to increase capacity for home labs and desktop k8s clusters without having to buy and configure a switch and complicated power delivery.

<comment><USER61> I'm not sure if this fits your use case, but it's what I plan on ordering soon [https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas- mini/#buyawesomefreenasmin...](https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas- mini/#buyawesomefreenasmini)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I definitively believe that we need to fix the way email is handled, but I don't think this is the solution.

I wanna get away from "free" email, but I think it requires a more full blown solution, something which offers a client with the polish of gmail.com along with it's excellent spam detection/protection, that can be self hosted on any random computer/server (using docker, or similar) that is very nearly plug and play.

Unfortunately, such a project would need to be OSS, with a consulting-type income structure, but the big companies that would be willing to pay for such a thing all use O365, and would never be willing to try something not nearly as proven.

<comment><USER63> > I definitively believe that we need to fix the way email is handled, but I > don't think this is the solution.

Sorry, I respectfully disagree. We shouldn't fix email, we should throw it away and replace it.

It is almost impossible to have secure email that can't be eavesdropped, even with PGP. Normal people just don't get the need for security and can't bother the hassle of encrypting their email.

Also, from an usability perspective, email was a solution for an age without mobile computing.

What we need is something like Signal: instant messaging with privacy built in by default.

<comment><USER62> I don't think that idea is realistic. While I agree that it would be great if we could find a fast, secure replacement for email, that's not happening.

Signal isn't federated and doesn't allow me to selfhost.

If you wanna start a messaging platform that can become a defacto standard you need to allow anyone to implement it, you also need to prove a value-add aside from security and privacy (which 99% of consumers don't care about) which builds momentum, it also shouldn't piggyback or rely on email in anyway. Much the same way that email didn't require a snail mail letter to create an account.

email is a solution to a communication problem which happens when two people aren't in the room together. It replaced memos, quick phone calls, long form letters, etc.

Instant messaging UX really only addresses the quick phone call and possibly short memos. The UX strongly discourages anything longer than 3-4 lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> So they use a registered ip proxy to your own email server. I've been doing that for a super long time, and it's a great solution, at least until about 5 years ago.

Most providers will blacklist anyone who isn't one of them. So I front my home email server with a big account to relay in and out of. It kinda sucks, but all my stuff just works.

So I can happily fire up my Macintosh II, load up Outlook 98 and read email.

I use Office 365 to front my domain, I think it's like $12 a month for the corporate version so I can have it front domain emails. And that means I get office for all my devices so I'm not the one having to deal with having old versions of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't like Google reading my email either. But I still use Gmail because I can search 20 years of my emails (including ones I imported from Yahoo mail) instantly. It is surprising no one has mentioned search in this discussion.

<comment><USER66> Probably because Gmail isn't the only email provider that lets you search. I run my own email server and can search them just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is a market cash grab that preys on peoples' ignorance and fears. Fancy looking hardware for an excessive cost that isn't stand-alone. For e-mail. Really?

<comment><USER57> I know the founders and can confidently say this is anything but a cash grab. They don't andvertise this fact, but the guys are really into privacy, and they want to see this come to life for the sake of data protection. VC funding is the means to make it a reality, as good hardware is expensive and takes time to get right.

<comment><USER68> > as good hardware is expensive

They don't need to sell hardware to achieve what they're doing. In the current form, they are mainly selling a service (SMTP relay on EC2) disguised as hardware (imx board inside a fancy box).

Why not charge the service for $100/year and allow anyone to use a Raspberry Pi and USB flash drive, which costs $35+$20? If they're using Linux on an imx, then there's likely little difficulty in porting to Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER57> If I understand what you are asking correctly, then you are not wrong, and there's definitely an option to do this, but you are not the customer they are looking for.

If you have the chops to get a Rpi running, then you probably know how to run a mail server or you are definitely able to read an EXIM book and get it going on EC2 in a day... with all the consequences.

On the other hand, if you are a business professional, or a crypto holder, or a privacy concerned mom, you don't have the time and chops to go through the setup. What you want is an "iPhone for email", and this is what Helm will provide.

One device, simple setup, no hassle, all updates and management are taken care for you. It's beautiful, and $99/y isn't going to sway you. I pay $100/m for Comcast and get subpar internet in return, but I am not going to go and setup an ISP to save money.

That said, if you think this is a good idea but could be done at $100/y sub on a Pi, perhaps is a great time to start a competing service ;)

<comment><USER68> If a .iso is provided, I can't see why flashing a custom "Helm iso" is any different from flashing the default "Raspberry Pi iso", and there are a _lot_ of people who can flash the raspbian -- there have been 5 - 10 million raspberry pi's sold so far. So, I think there are a lot of people who can use the Raspberry Pi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Despite my initial misgivings, I would actually consider something like this, even at this price point, but there are a few things that for now are non- starters.

1) I'd need to feel secure my email would actually deliver correctly. Zack Whittaker on Twitter [1] mentioned that the CEO's email wound up in his Gmail spam folder. This would be utterly unacceptable for me, even though I don't frequently email new people.

2) The single domain per server totally makes this DOA for me. I have multiple domains with separate, non-aliased mailboxes, controlled via legacy GApps accounts. It winds up being a security advantage because I use different accounts/domains for different services and that means that the likelihood of me being severely hacked is lower as a result. But beyond that, a single domain designation seems off for this type of product. The people willing to spend $500 on this kind of hardware are the people who have multiple domains.

3) I worry about the long term future of a startup like this. If they go out of business, not only is my hardware now worthless, I now have to migrate my inboxes to Fastmail or GSuite or something else, or face configuring my own local mail server, which is what I was trying to avoid to begin with. And in my case, that would also potentially mean giving up grandfathered GApps accounts with 50 users and custom domain support.

I wish Helm luck and we need disruptive email startups and better turnkey hosting solutions, but I'm not sure this is the right solution at the moment.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/zackwhittaker/status/1052619938349899776...](https://twitter.com/zackwhittaker/status/1052619938349899776?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER70> A proprietary piece of hardware that connects to a proprietary, US-based cloud. This is the closest thing to garbage in the world of email.

</comment><comment><USER71> Services like this are popping up everywhere. It seems to me that daplie's successful indiegogo campaign started it. Of course, daplie was then taken over by cryptocurrency nuts that turned what would have been a good product into a token mining personal server for no good reason.

The founder of daplie is moving on to found ppl, which is also similar to helm, but without email being the primary focus. I started helping with the email feature before getting a new job and not having any spare time for the project. This is a better solution to email than we had come up with.

I still wonder, does one successful kickstarter mean there's enough market demand for these products to succeed? I just can't see personal servers at home becoming anywhere near user friendly enough for the general population. Go try a digital ocean 1-click install 3 times in a row. The results are different every time. I see that same problem happening with these personal servers.

</comment><comment><USER72> I wish them all the best but I don't know a single person in the market for this. For geeks, programmers and DIY folks it's overpriced, for the casual user the benefits are questionable - you're switching from a proven, free blackbox (GMail) to an unproved, paid blackbox. It's a tough market to enter, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER73> Sooo you want me to pay 100$ per year for hardware i'm running at home already?

Nope.

And i also do not want to have my email gateway at home. I do move, i do like to shutdown hardware, i like to travel and might not be able to access my hardware.

There are good small and secure email providers out there which costs money. I would even prever a managed vps server somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER74> I have no idea who this is for. Non-technical people don't care, and this is still too complex for them. Technical people can use Fastmail or other secure, hosted options. $500 for proprietary hardware is so steep, there are software options for the Rpi that do something similar for $40!

<comment><USER75> Well I might be a good example. I'm highly technical and I never want to try configuring an email server again. Did that once and no thanks. I _can_ do it, but since it's not a particular technical subdomain I have much experience with and its difficult and time consuming. And doing maintenance is just an ongoing headache I don't want.

However, I recognize the value of having my email served and saved on premises. If I could have a fairly secure and automated backup from my local files, that's great.

If I can also use a self hosted webmail interface then I want that too.

I agree that $500 is a lot, but it's not an absurdly large amount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Even if you dislike the idea or the price, you should be happy there are companies trying to change what has become a real privacy problem these days. At least for me, it gives me hope to think people out there are working on these issues and trying new approaches with new technology.

</comment><comment><USER77> I really appreciate that the "hero" video _asked_ me to click. That already shows you respect me enough not to just auto-play in my face. I think the video suffers from a bit too much dramatization, especially at the end with the triumphant movie trailer music and awkward shots of people looking directly into the camera. I also think some of the copy on the main page could be edited to sound clearer and more natural. For example:

* "Keys only you have access to" -> "Only you have the keys"

* "Room for growth" -> "Room to grow"

* "Gets better over time" -> "Always improving [etc.]"

I mention all the above because I really like what I see here and I'm looking for room in my budget after I post this comment :)

Good luck!

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> (I sent this as an email to helm's support but since the founders are responding here I am duplicating this here)

Your technology page mentions that you provide an mx gateway (presumably for inbound email for home networks that don't usually have a static IP address). You also mention that emails forwarded to the helm server via your gateway are encrypted end-to-end and your gateway cannot read the contents of that email.

I am unable to understand how this happens. TLS is not end-to-end -- since the sending mail server will establish a TLS connection with your gateway it means that you necessarily have to decrypt the incoming email before forwarding it to the helm server.

Can you explain to me how I am wrong here?

</comment><comment><USER79> Looks quite cool but why put a server into my flat? :thinking:

If I'm somewhere and my internet goes down, I will lose access to everything. And as we all know, stuff will go down at some point (probably at the most inconvenient time).

</comment><comment><USER80> If encrypted emails are stored on Helms cloud, why do we need hardware? Isn't a software solution possible where the user holds the encryption keys?

And secondly, if residential internet cuts off - would I lose emails sent to me?

</comment><comment><USER81> I will be surprised if this takes off. Sounds like a glorified Western Digital's MyCloud with a raspberry pi server... Also that annual subscription is a joke after purchasing the hard disk outright.

<comment><USER33> $99/yr is insane for this. Here's the reasoning they provide in their FAQ:

> Internet service providers normally don't provide their customers with > networking capabilities that are required to run an email server. In most > cases, upgrading to an expensive business class internet service is needed. > The subscription service that is part of the Helm service handles this for > you without you having to upgrade your ISP.

> We handle all fees associated with domain registration and renewal when you > create a new domain for your Helm. In addition, we also provide storage for > offsite encrypted backups and include access to new features, service and > security patches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Is it necessary to have a hardware device for this to function? I'd love to pay $99/year for a 120 GB encrypted email service, but don't want the hassle of owning more stuff. I'd go with ProtonMail but it's seriously expensive for the data price (24€/mo = 288€/yr for just 20GB).

I also can't imagine that having a hardware device in-home actually reduces the unit costs of that storage, so if this were an on-line service priced even cheaper, I'd love to pay for it.

My concerns echo those of commenter 'andr'.

</comment><comment><USER83> Can anybody explain why they want me to buy a 500$ piece of hardware? Can the same result not be achieved with a Raspberry Pi and any self-hosted open- source mail server?

Why is this not simply a download?

<comment><USER84> Because Silly Valley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Mh, not much convinced. I'm a fan of the idea of personal home server and I have built myself one having find a ISP that offer static IPv4 and v6 addresses with a reasonable price; for end-users I also understand the opportunity and need of pre-built appliance since they may understand actual sorry state of tech evolution but may not have enough knowledge to act autonomously but... Well your appliance seems to be too ridden by "modern design" I personally call it catastrophic.

</comment><comment><USER28> If the thing you're going against is "corporate server controls your data", why is the answer "EC2 proxy we control"? It sounds like I have to trust that server just as much, and essentially you're telling me you're, for some unspecified reason, more trustworthy than Google?

Do you have stats on e-mail deliverability given that you're suggesting I send all my e-mail through a random EC2 EIP? (Is it actually an EIP, or is it just default EC2 egress?)

<comment><USER12> Hi lvh - it's not a proxy. The EC2 instance can't see your emails. The Helm server initiates and receives TLS connections through the instance so it's really an extra hop on the internet. We don't see or keep data on deliverability of individual Helm servers. We use a dedicated EIP that we ensure are not on blacklists and configure reverse DNS as well.

<comment><USER28> If that's the case, why does it listen on IMAPS/993 and 587?

<comment><USER12> because it's forwarding packets to/from the Helm server in the home

<comment><USER28> But that's IMAPS and SMTP submission. Is that for random hosts on the Internet (like my phone on LTE) to read/send e-mail?

<comment><USER12> Yes - these ports are forwarded so customers can reach the server in their home from anywhere in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Honest question - What's up with that form factor? Seems designed to take up more space than necessary. Is there some reason for it or was it just an aesthetic choice?

<comment><USER87> They say the units will be stackable to increase storage capacity. The form factor seems suitable to that. Seems like it would also allow airflow on the bottom side without visible vents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> It's great idea, though i'm not sure who the target customer is.

Most people who care enough about security understand what this device does, along with actually buying one of these, will most likely already have the technical skills to setup something similar themselves.

That being said, once it supports multiple domains/domain aliases and webmail, I'll probably be picking one up, if not for anything else then for fun.

Is it open to users to be able to run their own docker images on it ?

</comment><comment><USER89> > While offline, emails sent to you will not be delivered. This does not, > however, mean that they are lost. ... the sender's email server will > periodically retry sending the email at a later time.

It could be interesting to see whether MTAs evolve away from that design feature/constraint. Email seems ever-more centralized. Then again, it's a great robustness feature with a very small downside if any, so hopefully it's just my paranoia.

</comment><comment><USER90> Good luck with AWS/Azure IP addresses. Most cloud providers have their entire IP blocks of compute services (VM, etc.) blacklisted by the majority of DNSBL and antispam actors. If the EC2 instances act as the last outgoing relay (the last IP) you will encounter email being rejected by recipient mail servers at some point.

Best solution is to have your own AS number and IP ranges and your own hosting.

</comment><comment><USER91> There are of course alternatives that are completely open [https://www.kinguardproject.org/](https://www.kinguardproject.org/)

Not sure about the Helm but i havn't found any source code nor any description on which open source components they use. But i for one would not trust my personal information to a closed box.

Disclaimer, i'm engaged in the Kinguard project.

</comment><comment><USER92> _Helm just works with your home network—no configuration needed. Helm connects securely to a unique gateway, which is assigned a static IP address so Helm is reachable by other mail servers and secure TLS sessions can be established._

This sounds like Helm becomes the email gateway. Sure, an email server might be running on the device, but emails will be routed through Helm the company. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER12> Hi apo - Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO of Helm here. The gateway funnels packets to and from the Helm servers in people's homes. These are packets of encrypted TLS sessions so we can't do anything with this traffic. Happy to answer any further questions or concerns.

<comment><USER40> That is not entirely true. Perhaps in the stated configuration it is, but since the domain points to the EC2 instance, you could always register a new LetsEncrypt certificate for it, and do a silent MITM.

Perhaps the architecture you describe is the best, however I would hope for two things to be supported: 1) The ability to run your own gateway server instead of having to trust one managed by your company. 2) The ability to disable the gateway entirely if you happen to have a business connection already.

<comment><USER12> It's possible but not something we would ever do. We are looking at STARTTLS Everywhere from EFF as means to help ensure that any cert changes would be tracked transparently.

#1 is something we will support via open source.

<comment><USER93> If running our own gateway server on a cloud provider of our choosing will really be an option, that might sell this for me. Would that remove the yearly $99 requirement? I understand we wouldn't get support for a lot of the things you handle transparently behind the scenes blacklist/DNS-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> This is cool guys. Kicking things off at the right time as well. However think I might be missing a few things.

1) Wasn't the whole point of email moving to the cloud to enable access on any device anywhere? If I move my email to Helm can I still access it on the go?

2) Assuming I can access it on the go. I'd need pretty fast upload speeds right? I live in Australia, and our internet is god awful.

<comment><USER12> 1.) it is globally accessible through the gateway it connects to 2.) for email services, you don't need much in the way of bandwidth for this to work very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> This feels like the infamous HN dropbox thread. I don't know if it's solving the problem well or not but this can totally make a killing. Privacy has really gone mainstream, it's pretty clear people are looking for new ways to engage with tech regardless of utilitarian considerations. The holiday season is coming and 500$ is reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER96> Just a heads up to any Helm employees, it looks like the website is running React in development mode. It should be easy to fix: [https://reactjs.org/docs/optimizing-performance.html#use- the...](https://reactjs.org/docs/optimizing-performance.html#use-the- production-build)

</comment><comment><USER97> I like the design. Its cool. But i cannot see the price to be reasonable. Personally if someone wants local server - mail with be not enough of a selling point for 499usd. So why not buy ds218+ (300usd) from synology and two 4tb NAS hard disks (200usd)- 500 usd? The setup is dead simple. It has mail server backup and media software.

</comment><comment><USER98> Who is this for? The regular person doesn't trust Helm any more than they trust Google... nor do they care that much.

The privacy oriented techie doesn't trust Helm any more than they trust Google... so they're going to do everything themselves from scratch anyway, so what does Helm do for them?

</comment><comment><USER99> I really need an open source composition of preexisting technologies that this product is trying to solve.

</comment><comment><USER100> As someone who has a homelab, I would be interested if there was an option to use your own hardware, and just subscribe to their email service. I would accept the "risks of having my own hardware" that they couldn't guarantee up time etc. +1 if it was containerized.

</comment><comment><USER101> I use mailinabox [https://github.com/mail-in-a- box/mailinabox](https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox) on DigitalOcean droplets for my personal and work email domains. It's been working great for months.

</comment><comment><USER102> I personally like very much the solution, but I don't like having one more device on my table.

PS: For some reason, people are willing to pay more and see more value on "physical things" than virtual solutions. Anyone knows the psychology behind this behaviour?

</comment><comment><USER103> Interesting idea, but i'm not going to lie - I hate the case design. it reminds me of how obnoxious the Boxee Box was. Needs its own footprint, can't stack it or anything else, and it is anything but unobtrusive.

the NUC form factor would be great.

</comment><comment><USER104> I can't help but feel that this is something that Apple should do with their AirPort Time Capsule. Give user the choice of hosting their own iCloud instance on the AirPort Time Capsule. It feels like a great way of selling more hardwares.

</comment><comment><USER105> Helm, also known as "Hillary Clinton" v1.0 (just joking, no politics intended). Anyway, while it is kind of awkward having a physical server at home or office, there's a sense of peace knowing i control my own privacy, especially when I can see the server with my own eyes. While people argue about using SaaS email service like Fastmail, nothing can be truly secure, with exception to true end-to-end encrypted email service like ProtonMail. Most email providers, even the privacy-centered email service like Mailfence, are still required to turn over their data in case of local (Belgian) court order.

The only thing I'd really want is to have option to not pay for annual $99 fee, and instead have everything configurable so that I can point tunnel it to my own VPS/VPN or I can use it at the office, where the business ISP account allows me to host my own email server.

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks really exciting, and I hope we see more offerings like this in the future.

</comment><comment><USER106> I _really_ love the tin-foil-hat reference in the name and the product design.

</comment><comment><USER107> Have you heard of Synology? Their NAS's are not just personal email server, but personal document servers, web servers, everything, configured through an online interface. I would highly recommend you check it out.

</comment><comment><USER108> If you have to rely on propriety code which makes a constant connection to a server hosted on AWS, I don't see any benefit over Fastmail or Proton. It's less secure and has a higher failure rate.

</comment><comment><USER109> Thought it was the awesome Open Source Music Synthesizer. [https://github.com/mtytel/helm](https://github.com/mtytel/helm)

</comment><comment><USER110> Am I missing something or is 500$ an awful lot for an email server? You could probably set up a personal e-mail server with a Raspberry and have more or less the same functionalities.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, $500 for the device and $100 per year for service? AND the usual concerns about keeping the device up and running?

What honestly makes this more appealing than $50 per year for Fastmail?

</comment><comment><USER111> I would never invest in anything like this because we should all be making strides to kill email not make it better or owning it or building services around 40 year old tech.

<comment><USER112> People have been trying to kill email for 40 years and failing. Their reinventions are usually worse than what they're trying to replace.

Unix, vim, emacs, lisp, the shell, and even the web itself is all old tech at this point. Old doesn't have to mean bad. It's tech that's stood the test of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> "Helm currently ships to anywhere in the United States. Unfortunately, we cannot ship to PO Boxes, Army Post Office (APO) or Fleet Post Office (FPO) addresses."

</comment><comment><USER114> The average home computer user has terrible security practices. Frankly, their email is safer being managed by a competent business. So who is the intended market here?

</comment><comment><USER115> I got a long way down the page before I realized this was a physical device. Most of the text suggests it's a self-hosted email server, like postfix etc.

</comment><comment><USER116> Awful name, there are so many projects called helm already.

</comment><comment><USER117> How hackable is this I wonder? Would just be cool to have a machine this shape. Of course you could probably do the same with a raspberry pi and a 3D printer.

<comment><USER12> Alex - Giri Sreenivas, co-founder of Helm here. We've designed security from the silicon up to make this device very difficult to hack. That means implementing secure boot, full disk encryption and utilizing a Secure Enclave for managing keys on the device.

And yes, you could definitely do this on a raspberry pi. That's what we used to prototype. It's not great for a long last, durable and secure platform though.

<comment><USER118> Fairly sure parent meant 'hackable' in the good sense of the word - ie. repurpose the hardware for your own uses and have root on it.

<comment><USER12> good point - I read it with the other connotation in mind. We plan to make a developer program available in the future. Stay tuned!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> I'd rather purchase their software and run this on my own FreeNAS box. The features sound awesome, but I don't need their fancy custom hardware.

</comment><comment><USER120> As someone building a personal email system in using Helm (the kubernetes package manager) I have a feeling the naming conflict is going to get confusing.

</comment><comment><USER121> What's the advantage over building your own email server at someplace like aws/linode/azure/gcp/rackspace/digital ocean?

</comment><comment><USER122> It's entertaining that setting up an email server is so painful that there is specialized prepackaged hardware is coming out for it.

</comment><comment><USER123> I'm surprised that I'm the only person who thought this was a Helm chart to run a personal email service on Kubernetes.

</comment><comment><USER124> What happens when there is a power or ISP outage?

<comment><USER125> You don't have independent redundant internet connections and reliable backup power at your home?

<comment><USER126> I suspect everyone here has at least multiple redundant internet connections if they have a cell phone.

<comment><USER125> While I have a cellphone, and can and do use it as a hotspot, I wouldn't exactly say it could provide a fallback connection for a server in my home, because it usually spends a significant part of the day out of WiFi reach of my home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> On my wishlist.

Also the yearly fee seems high compared to a lot of other stuff but still reasonable, especially as you start adding more services.

</comment><comment><USER128> The stackable expansion is a really nice idea.

</comment><comment><USER129> Don't most home ISPs block inbound server ports? I know Cox in particular does, as well as a few others. I have a business account for this reason that I pay a bit more (better support response too), but not sure if this is something a lot of people can even use without a backing service.

Cool idea though.

As an aside, any suggestions on easy to install/configure/update mail in a box + letsencrypt options? Thinking of throwing something on an rPI for similar chores.

<comment><USER130> They block port 25, but secure ports are usually open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER131> [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/)

</comment><comment><USER132> Wait, how does this hardware stacking work? Anyone have photos of the actual product? This all looks rendered.

<comment><USER133> It almost looks like there's a port in the top that expansions attach to. However, in the specifications, there is no expansion port listed. This makes me think that stacking is simply stacking, then we use a usb cable to attach the pieces.

<comment><USER12> There is no cable for stacking. The expansion units expose a USB-C male connector and plug into the base unit's USB-C female connector.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> Ok, in the "Do you know where your email is?" section, what's the dot in northeast Alabama?

</comment><comment><USER135> FreedomBox does that, and FreedomBox is Debian.

It runs on a cheap SBC and you can use a 15$/year VPS as a relay.

</comment><comment><USER136> Given the recent microchip hack, do folks feel more or less safe having this in their house?

</comment><comment><USER28> If the EC2 instance is just a proxy and not where your mail lives, why does it run IMAPS?

</comment><comment><USER137> I always own my email. The title itself is misleading and decreases my trust to the Helm.

<comment><USER8> Well the point is that if you trust a cloud provider, you don't own your email because Google owns it too. They have it all, in plaintext.

<comment><USER137> If I leave my car in a garage for repairing, I still own the car, even the garage can access it.

That means, even google can scan my emails, I still own the emails. The topic is about privacy while the title makes it to ownership. That's the misleading part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> How does this work for mobile? Most of my emails are read on the phone, outside of home.

</comment><comment><USER139> Nice, except for the form factor which doesn't allow stacking objects on top of it.

</comment><comment><USER140> Or you could use a raspberry pi and an SD card for like 10% of the price of this device.

</comment><comment><USER141> I imagine exactly 0 mainstream consumers care about this. What is the target market?

</comment><comment><USER28> Have you gotten any third party audits? Are you publishing the results?

</comment><comment><USER142> i really like the idea but it's too expensive for me. i would consider this it if was $200 didn't have a subscription fee.

</comment><comment><USER143> Wish this wasn't software bound to hardware

</comment><comment><USER144> Another product ruined by "design".

</comment><comment><USER145> It is not even April 1st.

</comment><comment><USER146> I came here looking for something related to Emacs and am now disappointed beyond belief.

</comment><comment><USER147> Am I the only person who wished Hillary Clinton would have appeared in that promo video?

</comment><comment><USER148> Do you use SPF and DKIM?

<comment><USER12> yes - we do! and DMARC as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER149> $499 - waaaat?

</comment><comment><USER150> @hillary_clinton ???

</comment><comment><USER151> "Want to do sketchy stuff, but not nerdy enough to set up your own email server?"

</comment><comment><USER152> Please don't be a jerk on HN ("Oh come on", "modern art installation"). Your question would be just fine without those bits.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER19> Understood. Comment edited.

<comment><USER152> Appreciated! I've detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18239371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18239371) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER153> Yeah, but is it RISCV?

<comment><USER154> Nope, the specs page says that it's ARM Cortex processor.

RISC-V is still new and expensive for companies like this

</comment></comment><comment><USER155> One of the worst ideas. Every big email provider (gmail, yahoo, outlook ...) do block every mail sent from a home isp. so you will not be able to send anyone a mail.

<comment><USER156> Very ignorant response. It's fairly straightforward to set up SPF for a new domain, and most big emails will follow these policies.

<comment><USER40> SPF won't help if the spam filter blocks residential addresses outright, which is commonly done using DNSBLs.</comment></comment></comment>


The Inanity of Airport "Security" - <AUTHOR> http://jetlagged.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/the-airport-security-follies/

<comment><USER2> Here's what I don't understand: you can only take 3 oz of liquid or "gel" onto an airplane, but you can take _unlimited_ amounts of powders and solids.

Assuming, for the moment, that every piece of carry-on luggage is screened for explosives (doesn't seem to be true, but let's go with it), what's stopping the enterprising terrorist from smuggling aboard a dangerous powder that _isn't_ an explosive?

I'm not even an expert in the area, and I can think of a few.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is Patrick Smith of Salon.com's Ask the Pilot series.

[http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2007/12/21/askthepilot25...](http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2007/12/21/askthepilot258/index.html?source=rss&aim=/tech/col/smith)

Great writing and also a great inside look at the industry.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater>

</comment><comment><USER5> Those with the wherewithal to wage battle against this idiocy would simply rather fly privately.

<http://netjets.com/>

Now that planes are the new buses, can't say that I blame them.

<comment><USER6> I wish I had 130K to spend on 25 hours of flight time.

<comment><USER5> Then stop reading this and get back to work.

(Do what I say, not what I do.)</comment></comment></comment>


Protected Internet: Stay Save Online Utopia.Fans Utopia.Fans - <AUTHOR> https://utopia.fans/security/protected-internet-stay-save-online/ <comment><USER2> Really cool site and good tips.</comment>


New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-29/miami-s-new-hurricane-hazard-dockless-scooters-as-projectiles <comment><USER2> Another article which I don't think has a paywall: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/30/hurricane-dorian-scooters- re...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/30/hurricane-dorian-scooters-removed-from- streets-in-florida.html)</comment>


Publisher of 'BitTorrent For Dummies' suing BitTorrent users for sharing copies - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/security/219417/wiley-suing-bittorrent-downloaders

<comment><USER2> Expecting this to be an Onion article...

<comment><USER3> Don't even care if it's one of those "honeypot" articles...the irony is great all around</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is innovating business models for media content? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm a student journalist writing an article on innovative business models for media content. There's been quite a lot of destruction of old business models in the last 10-15 years, and ads aren't making up for content being online for free. I'm examining some of the sites that experimenting with new ideas/models. Please let me know if I'm missing any top innovators in this space!
I'm focusing on paywalls/subscriptions, voluntary/mandatory micropayments, and advocacy/pro-active journalism services.
The sites/organizations I'm covering so far:
WSJ & Dow Jones Local Media Group newspapers (metered paywall)
NY Times (metered paywall proposed)
Financial Times (day/week Paypal micropayments)
Kachingle [distribute monthly fee to sites you support]
Flattr [distribute monthly fee to content you like]
Fraxion Payments [wordpress micropayments plugin] (interviewed co-founder)
JournalismOnline.com (Press Plus) -- interviewed spokesperson. [Press Plus has 1,400 letters of intent from newspapers in U.S., offering publishers 16 charging options]
Spot.Us -- proactive crowd-funded journalism, non-profit.
ProPublica -- proactive advocacy journalism non-profit, just won Pulitzer.
Wikileaks -- (I interviewed Julian Assange, editor) donation-supported non-profit that specializes in leaked information disclosure, controversial, behind recent Iraq video
Peer News -- for-profit, business model unannounced, but moving away from article format to more wiki/community powered.
Thanks so much, my hope is to provide a quality overview of the change happening in this industry. Will post article link when published. Jeremy <comment><USER2> This is sort of a meta-comment, but one thing I'd love to see is a good survey of how the current crop of innovation differs from previous ones, both in themselves and in relation to context. For example, micropayments were the big new thing in 1990s journalism, and micropayments are the big new thing today. What's changed, about the micropayments, the journalism, or the context? Presumably a lot, but I rarely see a good historical analysis.

As for a specific suggestion, Indymedia and Wikinews are two other non-profit, crowd-sourced journalism attempts. Indymedia aims at a far-left/activist viewpoint, while Wikinews aims at a more neutral one.</comment>