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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.