I had one of these devices and the user experience was superb. Essentially you got all the benefits of a home email server without the headaches.
You also (and many people could not wrap their heads around this) didnt give up privacy for your emails - Helm provided you an IP and proxy (via ec2) but assuming TLS protected SMTP connections (most are these days), inbound mail was protected with a cert that lived on your device, and outbound protected by the cert of the server you were sending to.
The home server was configured using a smartphone app but they kept choices to a minimum and made the setup process quite painless - adding my Helm to my iPhone was one click and one authorization IIRC and on my Mac similar (my linux laptop was only slightly more complicated).
You could put N domains and N users on the box - there were probably some upper limits there but I ever hit them. I had multiple domains and accounts though and it worked smoothly.
On the consumer side, I always found the biggest issue was trying to explain to people how it all worked. The people who cared about privacy tended to be skeptical that a pre-boxed home server with an ec2 proxy could be truly private, while everyone else didn't want to give up the convenience of gmail and webmail (oh ya, it offered no webmail - not a problem for me but I think some people definitely went to Protonmail instead because they prefer webmail, even though Protonmail unlike Helm can see all your email that is not Proton<>Proton or GPG encrypted).
But reading this, it seems pretty clear demand was way less of an issue than the supply side - Giri here has multiple stories of getting screwed over by contract manufacturers. Oy. It was a heroic effort at privacy tech and I was pretty bummed to see it fail.
Giri if you're reading this, thank you and your team for trying so hard. I loved the product and the spirit (rare in the Valley) of embracing privacy in a constructive, positive, non defeatist way. This was an extraordinary product on many levels.
It sounds like "hardware > service" was not just core to the product's value proposition, but also a core value of the founders.
And if so, I get it. But it seems like 99% of people will choose convenience over privacy, even if they claim that privacy is really really important. So if you're selling something that is more private than convenient, you should accept that you've eliminated 99% of the world from your TAM.
Curious how you would do it as a service, interesting idea. It always felt to me like you couldn't do it without the hardware component, because without a box in your home how can you be assured of privacy? The box is where the cert protecting your privacy lives, and it it's in some data center it becomes a "trust us, we won't look at it" situation (and if your threat model involves subpeonas or PRISM type requests you are SOL).
> because without a box in your home how can you be assured of privacy
Right, the idea is to install it on an existing box at your home… your always on desktop, or a raspberry pi, or whatever. Lots of people have home servers, and it would be much easier to install on an existing home server than to get a single function hardware device.
if your threat model involves subpeonas or PRISM type requests
Very very few people have that threat model and Helm probably wasn't secure enough to beat the government anyway. The "cloud providers don't look at your data" security model is good enough for people who are just looking for privacy.
You also (and many people could not wrap their heads around this) didnt give up privacy for your emails - Helm provided you an IP and proxy (via ec2) but assuming TLS protected SMTP connections (most are these days), inbound mail was protected with a cert that lived on your device, and outbound protected by the cert of the server you were sending to.
The home server was configured using a smartphone app but they kept choices to a minimum and made the setup process quite painless - adding my Helm to my iPhone was one click and one authorization IIRC and on my Mac similar (my linux laptop was only slightly more complicated).
You could put N domains and N users on the box - there were probably some upper limits there but I ever hit them. I had multiple domains and accounts though and it worked smoothly.
On the consumer side, I always found the biggest issue was trying to explain to people how it all worked. The people who cared about privacy tended to be skeptical that a pre-boxed home server with an ec2 proxy could be truly private, while everyone else didn't want to give up the convenience of gmail and webmail (oh ya, it offered no webmail - not a problem for me but I think some people definitely went to Protonmail instead because they prefer webmail, even though Protonmail unlike Helm can see all your email that is not Proton<>Proton or GPG encrypted).
But reading this, it seems pretty clear demand was way less of an issue than the supply side - Giri here has multiple stories of getting screwed over by contract manufacturers. Oy. It was a heroic effort at privacy tech and I was pretty bummed to see it fail.
Giri if you're reading this, thank you and your team for trying so hard. I loved the product and the spirit (rare in the Valley) of embracing privacy in a constructive, positive, non defeatist way. This was an extraordinary product on many levels.