Some of you may have heard of nomx, a box that you plug in to act as a local email server. It can talk directly to other nomx boxes, bypassing the usual relay servers in the cloud. It's also supposed to be able to talk to standard email servers if the person you are sending to doesn't have a nomx.

Well, it's not what it's cracked up to be. Inside the nomx is a plain old raspberry pi. If you have physical access to the box, you can easily open it and do what you like with it. Worse still, it runs Raspbian Wheezy, so all the software is way out of date.

And if an unskilled person tries to use it, they won't be able to receive mail from any cloud email server because those all use port 25 for smtp and nomx, by default, doesn't. It gets worse: most email servers won't accept outgoing email from any would-be server that has a dynamic ip address. You get put straight on the Spamhaus list. So you can't send and you mostly can't receive either -- except when talking to other nomx users. Not much fun, hey?

I got this from the BBC's Click program, but you can read a full rundown on https://arstechnica.com/information-...ions-protocol/

nomx have posted an explanation on their website; it's really bad, the classical "our consumers don't need to worry their pretty little heads about this".
they also never really say who they're talking about, but it's pretty clear that it's all about the above arstechnica article.
the statement hinges on the argument that "this is not something a typical user would do" (i.e. unscrew the lid and take out the memory card).
they focus on the sole aspect of nomx being hackable only locally by a malicious hacker and completely ignore Scott Helme's main point, that nomx is simply an outdated linux mail server in a raspi, in other words they're selling hot air.

anyhow, read both - nomx charmingly unprofessional defense, and the arstechnica article. it's 3 pages, but there's some good giggles in it.

The tone of the Nomex rebuttal reminds me irresistibly of Donald Trump!

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