CodaMail

A Digital Haven in an Impersonal World

Most places treat you like a data point, just trying to get in touch with anyone who will even respond to your issue almost anywhere today is an exercise in futility. Not here!

We offer something increasingly rare: genuine human connection paired with uncompromising dedication. We're not just another faceless corporation, we're a family of privacy advocates who've been protecting people's digital communications since the dawn of the public Internet.

When you contact our helpdesk, you're speaking directly with our core team, including our founder and CEO, Stephen Gielda, who strongly believes that the best way for us to keep our finger on the pulse of this service is to rotate on helpdesk...everyone.

There's no outsourced support center or AI chatbots handling your concerns – just real privacy experts, the actual developers of this service, who understand both the technical and human sides of digital security. Both the technical side of this service and the human side of how you use it.

While other providers focus on SaaS and capturing enterprise clients, we've deliberately chosen a different path. We're dedicated to serving individuals, families, organizations, and small businesses who need personalized solutions with support from someone who can offer them personal service.

From Kitchen Table to Digital Guardian

In the early 1990s, while most people were just discovering email, Steve was already deeply embedded in the emerging cypherpunk movement. Late nights in his home office laid the groundwork for what would become one of the internet's longest-running privacy services, all while his day job at GTE Internetworking/BBNPlanet had him developing early networking and hosting solutions.

What began in Usenet newsgroups and IRC channels quickly evolved. By 1997, the Security Garage launched through TIAC's userspace, and early January 1999, Steve had assembled a team of ten security and privacy-focused technologists (Dave, Durab, Fulcrum, Hawk, Gordon, Exavior, Nix, John, Alan, and Dan). Together, they established the Church of the Swimming Elephant (cotse.com), joining the ranks of other pioneering cypherpunk and security collectives of that era.

Cotse.com started modestly as a tech security site offering a free private email service all running on a single ISDN line. Fortuitous timing came when GTEI offered distributed services(basically a very early cloud) and during their build-out invited Cotse as a test case.

This couldn't have come at a better moment, the original ISDN connection had become two and both were perpetually saturated as traffic grew exponentially. As consulting requests began to come in, Packetderm LLC was formed to handle penetration testing and security consulting while maintaining Cotse operations. What began with small businesses quickly expanded to Fortune 100 clients, with Packetderm continuing to serve select clients today.

Cotse.com's free privacy-focused unlimited aliases mail service grew even faster than anticipated, necessitating its own dedicated service. Around 2000, our private e-mail service was separated from Cotse.com and rebranded as Cotse.Net under Packetderm LLC, and many more people joined the original team.

We've done it again. We now call our latest evolution CodaMail, but it is still Cotse at its core, with the Cotse.Net domain continuing to provide web hosting, proxies, and VPN services that complement our email platform. Still Cotse, with the same old-school values in our approach to our services and customers.

Those early days shaped our philosophy: privacy and security isn't just a feature, it's a fundamental right that requires constant vigilance and personal attention to maintain.

Perfect Size, Perfect Service

We've been around a long time – we are large enough to have built and maintained a robust, reliable infrastructure, but we stayed small enough that we never lost sight of why we started this journey: to provide the most advanced privacy based mail system available combined with with the old-school philosophy of helping everyone understand why all of this matters.

We love what we do and if we could do it for free, we would (endowments always welcome), but it costs far too much to run for free. So we must run it as a subscription to cover all the costs involved. In return, we never stop innovating and improving. We listen to our subscribers, because it is you who help us make this service even better decade after decade.

Over 25 years ago we offered features that nobody else had and today we are still doing the same! All with the same transparancy that we have always provided. Our terms, AUP, and privacy policy may be formatted differently, but they have always said essentially the same things they do now. Our values and ethics have not changed.

This personal approach means we can offer customized features that others simply can't. Need help with your personal domain email delivery? Having trouble with a particular sender getting caught in filters? Need someone to walk you through the intricacies of SPF, DMARC, and DKIM for your domain? We're here to help you personally, not direct you to an FAQ page.

New to it all? Don't know much about computers? That's OK, our service is very easy to simply use and we are here to help answer any questions you have. We will patiently guide and teach you. Are you an advanced user? If so, you will find this to be a service that can do anything you might want to do as you dig into it. Seriously, it's powerful. The only way you can get more control of your e-mail is running your own server.

We've weathered the storms of the Internet's evolution not through massive funding rounds or aggressive marketing, but by building lasting relationships with users who value both technical excellence and human connection.

Innovation Born from Experience, Not Buzzwords

Our 25+ years of experience means we've seen it all, from the early days of Usenet and BBSes to today's sophisticated surveillance challenges. This depth of experience can't be replicated by startups with flashy marketing but shallow roots.

Years before Gmail existed, we had already pioneered features that would later become industry standards:

  • Unlimited email aliases
  • User controlled filtering during the SMTP handshake
  • Custom SMTP headers regardless of client
  • Adaptive learning filters
  • Integrated encryption

Our longevity isn't the result of massive marketing budgets or venture capital, it's because we've stayed true to our core mission: providing uncompromising privacy and cutting edge features with complete user control, and doing so with personal support.

A Footnote

We get asked why we aren't all over social media, the answer is simple, we don't want to be. We don't need Linked-In look at me's. The majority of those who have subscribed with us over the years are still with us. We don't just talk the talk. We value our privacy, too, and are simply not interested in joining what we started this to protect against.

If you want to know about us and our values, it's very easy to find cotse.com and cotse.net history all over the Internet. We've been online offering our privacy services since the early days of the Internet. We don't need AI generated bios and photos, we've got a solid history. We are transparent and always have been, what we offer is real, it's standards based, fully exportable, and it has worked and been honed for decades.