Privacy with a Personal Touch

In the early 1990s, while most people were just discovering email, we were already deep in the emerging cypherpunk movement. It started on BBSes, spread to Usenet newsgroups and IRC channels, and kept growing. By 1997, the Security Garage had launched through TIAC’s userspace.

In early January 1999, a team of eleven security and privacy-focused technologists (Steve, Dave, Durab, Fulcrum, Hawk, Gordon, Exavior, Nix, John, Alan, and Dan) established the Church of the Swimming Elephant at cotse.com, joining the ranks of the pioneering cypherpunk and security collectives of that era.

Cotse.com began modestly: a tech security site offering a free private email service, all running on a single ISDN line. The timing of what came next was fortuitous. Just as our traffic grew exponentially and both of our (by then two) ISDN lines sat perpetually saturated, GTEI/BBN Planet began offering distributed services, essentially a very early cloud, and invited Cotse in as a test case during their build-out.

We quickly surpassed 22,000 users in six months. This was substantial in 1999. And traffic on the security reference site also skyrocketed. Consulting requests arrived alongside that growth, and Packetderm LLC was formed for security and email consulting as well as handling Cotse operations as it evolved beyond a hobby.

The free, privacy-focused, unlimited-alias mail service continued to grow even faster than anticipated. Around 2000 it was separated from the cotse.com reference site and rebranded standalone as Cotse.Net under Packetderm LLC.

CodaMail is the evolution of Cotse.Net, rebranded again in 2025, built on our own private cloud in our own private datacenter. Not just a cage in a datacenter, but our own datacenter. We are the only ones with physical access to the building and servers, and only select members of we. It is still Cotse at its core, and the Cotse.Net domain continues to provide the web hosting, proxies, and VPN services that complement our email platform. Same service, same values, same people who care. Just a new name, a new look, and even more features.

Historical Archives

We’re proud of where we came from. See for yourself:

• Early Cotse with our opening, unfortunately missing sound
• Cotse.Net offering unlimited aliases in Sept 2001
  (we offered them in 1999, but the wayback machine doesn't have it archived)
• We even made games

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.

And on the operational front, the decades taught us a thing or two about providing a reliable and robust email service. Our history is proof of this and it also demonstrates our commitment: never an ad, never any data sold or otherwise shared, always transparent, and no changes in our mission. 27 years of proven trust.

We’ve been around a long time. We’re large enough to have built and maintained robust, reliable infrastructure, and we intend to remain small enough to never lose sight of why we started: to provide the most advanced and flexible standards-based privacy mail system available.

We have scaled with the times, but we are nearing our cap. We have no desire to become a large corporation, only for all of our emplyees to live a comfortable life doing what they enjoy. So we have an unpublished cap on total subscribers, after which we become waitlist to maintain the maximum size that we desire to be.

The transparency hasn’t changed. Our terms, AUP, and privacy policy may be formatted differently than they were 27 years ago, but they have always said essentially the same things. Our values and ethics have not changed.

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