Privacy with a Personal Touch
25+ years of protecting digital communications with genuine human connection and old-school values.
Who We Are
We’re not another faceless corporation. We’re a family of privacy advocates who have been protecting people’s digital communications since the dawn of the public Internet, and we still run this service the way we did then: the people who build it are the people who answer when you write in.
That combination is increasingly rare. Most places treat you like a data point, and just reaching anyone who will respond to your issue is an exercise in futility almost anywhere today. Not here.
Our Story: From an ISDN Line to Our Own Cloud
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.
As consulting requests arrived alongside that growth, Packetderm LLC was formed for penetration testing and security consulting while maintaining Cotse operations. What began with small businesses quickly expanded to Fortune 100 clients, and Packetderm continues to serve select clients today.
The free, privacy-focused, unlimited-alias mail service grew even faster than anticipated and soon needed a home of its own. Around 2000 it was separated from cotse.com and rebranded as Cotse.Net under Packetderm LLC, and many more people joined the original team.
Now we’ve done it again. Our latest evolution is CodaMail, built on our own cloud, but 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 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.
Old-School Service, In Person
When you contact our helpdesk, you’re speaking directly with our core team, the actual developers of this service.
Everyone here rotates on helpdesk, including our founder and CEO, who strongly believes that the best way for us to keep our finger on the pulse of this service is exactly that … everyone.
There’s no outsourced support center and no AI chatbot handling your concerns. Not getting mail you should? Getting mail you don’t want? Need someone to walk you through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your own domain? We’re here to help you personally, not direct you to an FAQ page.
New to all of this? That’s OK. The service is easy to simply use, and we will patiently guide and teach you. Advanced user? Dig in; you’ll find a service that can do just about anything you want. Seriously, it’s powerful. The only way to get more control of your email is to run your own server.
The Right Size, On Purpose
We’ve been around a long time. We’re large enough to have built and maintained robust, reliable infrastructure, and we stayed small enough to never lose sight of why we started: to provide the most advanced privacy-based mail system available, with the old-school philosophy of helping everyone understand why it 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 run it as a subscription that covers the costs. In return, we never stop innovating and improving, and we listen to our subscribers; it is you who help us make this service better decade after decade.
The transparency hasn’t changed either. Our terms, AUP, and privacy policy may be formatted differently than they were 25 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.
Innovating Since Before It Was Standard
Depth of experience can’t be replicated by a startup with flashy marketing and 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
Over 25 years ago we offered features nobody else had. Today, we still do. The mission hasn’t moved: uncompromising privacy and cutting-edge features with complete user control, delivered with personal support.
Experience the Personal Touch
Join the multitudes who’ve discovered that privacy doesn’t have to mean sacrificing functionality, interoperability, or personal service.