About Us & Our Mission
25+ years of flexible, private email built on open standards
About Us
CodaMail is the latest evolution of Cotse, a privacy-focused email service that has operated continuously since January 1999. We emerged from the cypherpunk movement of the early 1990s, when a team of security and privacy-focused technologists came together to build something different: email that respected user privacy while remaining practical and interoperable. Something that was easy to use, but gave the average person more control than if they ran their own email server.
Years before Gmail existed, we pioneered features that would later become industry standards, including unlimited email aliases. We've resisted becoming a larger corporation, corporations dilute ideals. We've never taken venture capital, never run advertising, and have grown entirely through word of mouth from satisfied subscribers who value both technical excellence and personal service.
Today, CodaMail operates under Packetderm LLC, the same company that has maintained this service for over two and a half decades. We remain small enough to provide genuine personal support, where every staff member, including our founder, rotates on helpdesk, yet large enough to maintain robust, reliable infrastructure.
Our longevity isn't the result of marketing, it's because we've stayed true to our values: privacy, flexibility, open standards, rapid response, and treating every subscriber as an individual.
Our Mission
Privacy First, Flexibility Always
We are a privacy-first service. But we also believe that most people don't actually want everything encrypted, and that's not because they don't care about privacy. It's because email serves a very different role than secure messengers.
When people want a fully encrypted, sealed conversation, they already know where to go: Signal, Session, or similar tools exist precisely for that purpose.
This understanding shapes everything we build and is why our encryption is designed with this flexibility in mind.
What We Strive to Provide
We believe people prioritize reliability, speed, flexibility, interoperability, security, and privacy. They want their mail to be there when they need it, whether that's on a phone, a laptop, or a web interface. They expect messages to arrive quickly, sent in minutes, received in minutes, and they want searches to be fast and comprehensive, not something that stalls because every message has to be decrypted client-side before it can be indexed.
Interoperability matters just as much. People don't want to frustrate recipients by forcing them to follow links, create accounts, or perform extra steps just to read every message, though they accept it when sending something truly sensitive. They want email to just work, regardless of whether they or their recipient uses Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, a phone, or a web client.
They expect thier favorite email apps, calendars, contacts, task lists, and notes to sync natively with their devices using standard protocols, not proprietary apps or locked ecosystems. And they increasingly expect modern conveniences: scheduled sending, easy-to-use aliases, the ability to reject what they don't want, intelligent organization, out-of-office replies, forwarding, encryption when needed, and features that go well beyond what basic mail hosts offer.
Encryption as Choice, Not Mandate
When it comes to encryption, we beleive that what most people want is choice.
They don't want to be locked into a walled garden/email HOA where everything is decided for them and nteroperability is sacrificed. Instead, they want the ability to decide:
- This message should be encrypted end-to-end
- That one is fine being broadly readable
- Another might need zero-access encryption at rest
- Or perhaps everything should be zero-access encrypted
We provide the tools to encrypt everything if you want to, specific aliases if you prefer, messages matching your own criteria, or nothing at all if that suits your needs. The choice is yours, not ours.
⚙️ People Want Control
In short, people want control.
Email isn't trying to be Signal, and it shouldn't be forced into that mold. People want email to remain universal, fast, and dependable, while still giving them meaningful privacy controls when and where they actually make sense.
We built CodaMail on open standards with the latest encryption: IMAPS, POPS, Secure SMTP, Secure Private CalDAV and CardDAV, and standard Sieve Filtering. Use any email client you want. Sync with any device that supports standard protocols. Import and export your data freely, we ensured that absolutely everything is easy to import and export. You are never locked in.
We've spent 25+ years perfecting this balance: maximum flexibility, genuine privacy options, complete interoperability, and the reliability of infrastructure you can depend on.
Email that works the way email should work, with the privacy controls you actually need, and the flexibility to use it however you choose.
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