Origins in the Dawn of the Public Internet
In the early 1990s, when most were just discovering the Internet's potential, our story began in the privacy and security Usenet groups. While others were still exploring basic connectivity, we were already deeply embedded in the Cypherpunk movement, actively participating in the evolving landscape of digital communication—from uunet and BBSes to Usenet, IRC, and the Web.
Operating initially as the Security Garage through TIAC's userspace, we quickly gained recognition for our commitment to both security and privacy—seeing them as inseparable pillars of digital freedom at a time when most groups focused on only one aspect or the other.
Innovation and Evolution
By the mid-1990s, we were actively contributing to the mixmaster remailer network, developing pioneering privacy tools that would shape the future of secure communications. In 1997, we revolutionized email privacy by introducing subdomain unlimited user-controlled aliasing—a feature that wouldn't become mainstream for nearly a decade.
Our innovation extended to developing multiple groundbreaking privacy tools to simplify the complex nature of the remailers:
- Mail2news services allowing anonymous email-to-Usenet posting
- Web2news interfaces (mixmail and mixnews) for enabling anonymous Usenet participation
- News2remail services for private Usenet access
- Some of the Internet's first privacy-focused web proxies
- The first to offer user controllable unlimited subdomain based email aliases
- Leapfrog - A port redirection utility for both Windows and Unix. Full access control, admin utilities and more. Open Source.
- Winetd - A full Inetd for Windows NT and 2000 with a twist. Includes honeypot daemons and the ability to trace information about the connection. Includes tcp_wrappers and real daemons along with honeypots.
- AnonMailer - An abuse proof remailer interface.
- Winux - Numerous linux utilities ported to windows.
The Birth of Cotse.Net
1999 marked a pivotal year with the establishment of our own domain as the Church of the Swimming Elephant (cotse.com - Click to see our glorious flash opening screen back then). We joined ranks with other iconic groups of the era, including the Cult of the Dead Cow, the Temple of the Screaming Penguin, and L0pht Heavy Industries. This period cemented our position as pioneers in the privacy space and also began our association with elephants. Suddenly they were everywhere in the office...and they have multiplied since.
During this time we had been running a free privacy based e-mail service at Cotse that had grown too large to continue to support without help. So in January of 2001 we spun our Cotse Webmail off into a full privacy service under the Cotse.Net domain and still offered it for free while we built it. July 4th, 2001 we went subscription and we have operated this way for 25 years. Now we are reborn again, not only in features for new landscapes in privacy, but by spinning our mail services off into our CodaMail domain, although we do maintain the cotse.net domain both for nostalgia and to separate our proxy and VPN services from our mail services.
Challenges and Impact
Our commitment to privacy often came with significant challenges. We faced confrontations with various entities, including the Church of Scientology, and our founder, Stephen Gielda, experienced one of the internet's first documented "swatting" incidents in February 1999—when federal agents (DEA, FBI, Secret Service, and ATF) arrived at his door following anonymous threats to government officials.
Yet these challenges never deterred us. Instead, they reinforced our mission. Over the years, our services have proven valuable to a diverse range of users:
- Supporting journalists and humanitarian organizations in their work
- Helping individuals and groups maintain private communications in challenging situations
- Providing secure communication channels where privacy is crucial
- Serving countless doctors, dentists, small businesses, organizations, and individuals globally
Technical Innovation and Leadership
Years before Gmail's launch, we had already pioneered features that would later become industry standards:
- Unlimited email aliases
- Advanced server and user-level filtering
- Custom SMTP headers regardless of client
- Selective header removal
- Comprehensive attribute-based filtering
- Integrated PGP encryption
If you could envision an email feature, we likely offered it half a decade before others contemplated it.
Click here to visit the Wayback Machine and see what we offered back in 2002The Modern Era: CodaMail and Cotse.Net
Today, our services operate under a strategically designed two-domain structure:
- CodaMail serves as our dedicated email domain, purposefully separated from other services to ensure reliable Webmail access. By maintaining this domain exclusively for email services, we protect our users from many network filters for public internet services that filter domains with VPN and proxy services.
- Cotse.Net continues as our premium tier, hosting our VPN, proxy, and web hosting services. While this arrangement honors our historical legacy, it's primarily a practical decision—allowing us to offer our full range of privacy services while protecting our core email infrastructure from potential blocks that could affect proxy/VPN-associated domains.
Our Approach and Values
What sets us apart isn't just our history—it's our approach:
- We focus on function over hype, letting our service speak for itself
- We maintain perfect balance: large enough for robust infrastructure, small enough for personal service
- Our support comes directly from our development team, including our founder. Which means when you contact helpdesk, you are speaking to someone who can immediately fix things for you. We have always believed that the best way for our development team to understand user needs is to take turns on helpdesk
- We remain completely independent—no investors, no advertising, no partnerships
- Your subscription is our only support, ensuring our loyalty remains with you alone
Looking Forward
After more than 25 years of service, we remain committed to our core mission: providing uncompromising privacy with complete user control and doing so with complete transparency. Our values have never waivered, we have maintained them in the face of adversity and we have been proved correct by time itself. Whether you've been with us since the 90s or are just discovering us today, you've found the internet's longest-running privately owned, privacy-focused email service, operated by one of the most experienced teams in digital privacy.
Our independence, experience, and unwavering commitment to privacy principles continue to guide us as we evolve and enhance our services for the next generation of privacy-conscious users.