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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

If you are proxying the content with a VPN with a static IP on an EC2 instance you cannot police people sending out spam as you cannot see and meter the SMTP traffic. So does everyone get a dedicated instance and IP? If that is the case people are going to have issues getting their email accepted by almost all providers due to the IP being new and on a cloud provider block. If it is a subset of IPs that you create a reputation for and comply with DKIM, SPF etc how are you going to keep it from getting ruined by bad actors?

I am glad you are doing this because running a mail server is non trivial. I have done it for a long time now and love the fact that I own my email identity. It is one of the few things left you can own online.

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I think this is the biggest problem. If there are a lot of bad actors, you drag down the whole system, but if you try to prevent bad actors you run into a lot of issues.

A hard problem, and I don't envy anyone trying to solve it.

No offense, but given that you are making a product that has a much higher potential to enable bad actors than usual, isn't it kind of you/your company's job to try to solve it?

EDIT: Just realized I responded to the wrong person :(

No, it's not. In fact it's your job to try and police yourself. But you probably on someone else to control you don't you?

I mean, my thought is that if a high volume of spam causes other email servers to block Helm, then it makes it unusable to the good actors in the system. I didn't see the CEO address this.

Or, maybe I just misunderstand smtp idk

Yeah, that's how I understand the issue too. I don't think there's an easy way to do things, either you end up blocking some people with a legitimate use case or you end up becoming a spam farm.

The person you are replying too isn't the CEO. Just another new user (that's why the username is in green).

You learn something new every day, I always assumed the green meant OP, like how reddit uses blue. I didn't even notice the change in username Thanks!

Thanks for teaching!

Spammers can already get mail servers without a problem. This doesn’t make that easier, because it’s already as easy as it can be.

Hi graybolt, I'm Dirk, co-founder and CTO at Helm. Each Helm Personal Server is assigned their own IP address. We make sure to only use IP addresses that haven't been put on blacklists. If people abuse the service by sending spam it will only affect the reputation of their assigned IP and won't cause harm to the reputation of other Helms.

How do you plan to protect users from themselves? I.e. 2 charater passwords.

If you're spending $500 on something to help keep your stuff private and secure, you're probably not a 2 character password kind of guy.

Oh boy, I know people with a fiber drop, 25tb raids with baby server farms and single character password. I think you highly underestimate the lazyness and/or stupidity of people. That doesn't even cover fishing.

Secondly, I think you underestimate the time intensive work that goes into clearing up an IP. I've run mail servers with users in the thousands. It's basically a full time job to keep a single ip clean. And that's with a half or less percentage of clueless users. I'm unsure how this will scale to hundreds of IPs let alone the thousands(x100) that would probably be needed to make creating your own hardware profitable.

Third, you're going to need to reach incompetent customers to make this profitable.

Yeah that isn't sufficient. Most people are going to get their email rejected or spam filtered from many sources. Having an IP that is not blacklisted is not sufficient to have it have enough reputation to be accepted by large providers.

There's an easy way to make Helm entirely uninteresting to spammers and that is for the server to limit the number of outbound emails that can be sent at a number that normal people would never exceed but that doesn't allow enough volume to be interesting to a spammer. There are much easier/cheaper alternatives for spammers today too.

Thanks for the question and your support!

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