gsreenivas

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

Thanks for the kind words!

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

There isn't any lock-in using a Helm. You can always access and export your data on the LAN using standards-based clients to get your data wherever you'd like it to be.

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

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

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

Great for laptops/desktops, horrible for servers. You would have to be present for the challenge/response on a reboot. Also, doesn't solve the secure boot issue. FDE w/o secure boot isn't particularly useful.

There is an ongoing cost for email to work (static IP, DNS, tunneling for traffic) - this is why there is a subscription. It's not very complicated or malicious.

If a customer doesn't want a subscription, they can still use the Helm on their local network and get access to all their data. Running without a subscription is not something we currently support because of a lot of variables that can prevent email from working consistently, creating a heavy support burden (which is costly) along with bad customer experiences. It's best for people wary of a subscription to go down the DIY path (and we end up with a lot of DIY switchers once they realize how much effort it is).

I'm not sure where you got that the device would be bricked. Can you point me to where you saw this?

All data is accessible on local ports on the LAN, with or without the subscription service.

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

If people are lumping in all tech companies in with big tech, we should all be concerned about that.

A red flag for what? I would like to understand this better.

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

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

residential IP addresses are generally blacklisted by email services

We might consider adding support in the future - we're not philosophically against it, but it is more work to develop and support.