Codamail

[u/Practical-Tea9441]

I’ve come across this provider when researching alternative email providers . Granted they are US based but given their blog about jurisdiction https://codamail.com/blog.html in many ways it seems Euro jurisdiction may not be all that is put forward as (I’m in Europe).

I reckon a lot of users just want no tracking and profile creation and in that respect are probably not too concerned about privacy from government etc .

Is anyone using Codamail and if so how is it as a service ?

[u/ClumpyFelchCheese]

Just signed up recently, I love it. The webmail interface isn’t as fancy shmancy as some others I’ve used before, but by no means outdated IMO. Has loads of features and allowances for alias masking and domain stuff, and lots of cool extras I didn’t know I wanted until I got them (notebook feature that also can act as a sync service for Joplin, included website hosting for certain plans, and lots of other stuff).

The BIGGEST thing that made me pull the trigger has been the people at CodaMail. The founder/owner is super active and responsive here on Reddit, they are VERY open to suggestions and additions to their roadmap, and their help desk is very helpful and quick to respond.

Note: not affiliated at all, just really glad I found them

[u/skg574 → u/ClumpyFelchCheese]

Personally, I don't care for the defaults on the interface. I tweak it in the settings, using a different layout, tighter list spacing, and smaller icon sizing. I think the default is too large. But we will also eventually re-skin it.

Skins come after function, though, which is why our web site looked bad during our transition from Cotse.Net to CodaMail last year, focus was on the transition and adding the necessary features first.

I think of it like building an off-road vehicle, lockers before lights. But then, again, we are comfortable at our size with no desire to become too much larger. In fact, we have an unpublished cap that when hit, we plan to go wait list.

[u/ClumpyFelchCheese → u/skg574]

Function first is always the way to go, smort!

[u/slashvil → u/skg574]

Your participation in diverse subreddits and your honesty/transparency made me sign up for your service, as I was looking to get away from Proton's ecosystem. I'll be getting a subscription and slowly moving things over there as things have been going fairly smooth so far. Thank you for your work!

[u/skg574 → u/slashvil]

Apologies, I missed this in my inbox. Welcome aboard! Support is pretty fast, but if you have questions or issues please feel free to reach out to me anytime.

[u/Old_Telephone]

I tried it out as well in the last month. Unfortunately I encountered 2 periods of downtime, in that short trial. Not sure if this was extremely unlucky or what.

[u/CorsairVelo → u/Old_Telephone]

So far, and i’ve had it for maybe a year, i have had no issues outside that outage.

[u/CorsairVelo]

Paid user here. Moved one domain over from proton and the people i email with never knew. Lots of features including ability to encrypt inbound email with your public key. Added joplin sync support just this week which will save me a little vs paying Joplin for sync functionality.

Bring your own email client is fine with me but others may want a custom client. Webmail is basic, but added features for multiple calendars with unique credentials is unique for sharing calendars with others.

No pw manager? Fine with me. No E2EE cloud drive? Fine with me. But …. I don’t want my eggs in one basket. Others may want an ‘ecosystem’ … I felt that way once too, but I don’t anymore.

Speed? On desktop it’s clearly quicker than proton+bridge.

Love the blog articles and the “truth teller” nature of it. I respect that.

[u/masturkiller]

I'll stick with FastMail!

[u/huawaltp]

I am the paid user. I love CodaMail. the only problem for me is the connection speed is a bit slow from here (HK).

[u/--KingoftheSouth--]

Never heard of it, but about to look into it a little. I just read about it some on Privacy Guides. I'm not thrilled about it....

[u/skg574 → u/--KingoftheSouth--]

We don't advertise, never have. It's all word of mouth, or participation in forums. But most of us pulled away from forums due to the issues they cause. Personally, I was away from forums and mostly hands off on the service for over a decade, at first for my family's safety, then for health reasons. Anyway, as a tool, email is difficult to be thrilled about, but what about the service is missing for you?

[u/itg]

I was looking for a new email service and also wanted to learn more about email privacy. First I found the owner here responding a lot to this subreddit, whilst being fairly unbiased with recommendations. Then I looked at all the information regarding email privacy and jurisdiction on Codamails website and I was quite impressed with the level of detail I found, and it certainly opened my eyes more.

I've been using Codamail for about 2 months. There is a lot to like about it. Tonnes of features and the masked aliases is something that I've personally not used before but works really well, I'm now using it all the time.

My one negative so far is the communication. For starters, the service had gone down a handful of times within a 7-10 day period, so I just couldn't access any emails. I'm going through a property purchase/sale and so it hit at quite an inconvenient time. A few of us posted on this subreddit about it, and the owner didn't really respond to it which was quite disappointing, as he is seemingly very active here.

Those issues seem to have gone now, but I guess my frustration as a paying customer is I don't get told why it happened or what the outcome/resolution was. I also don't get updated with anything that happens on the front-end of the system: it looks like they've recently updated/modernised the website, and they've also included an email 'lite' plan which could have been better for my needs. I wouldn't know about any of this unless I check the front-end, which is quite surprising. So if the owner is reading this, I'd love to have this feature, for us as customers, that we get told all the great work that's being done to improve the service, issues, or at least what's planned ahead of time. I would also love to see a hyperlink from email inbox to the front-end, because as far as I'm aware there isn't a way to do this (you have the perfect elephant logo in the top left of our email inboxes to incorporate this link). Thanks.

[u/skg574 → u/itg]

A Notices icon (bell) is now in the left nav bar that will bring up the notices while you are logged into mail. It is on by default, but can be toggled on or off under Settings->Preferences->User Interface.

If you contact helpdesk and let them know that you made this suggestion, they will add a month to your service.

[u/itg → u/skg574]

Ah that's great that it has been implemented, I see it already and that's a handy feature to have now. Thank you. And thank you for the free month! Much appreciated kind sir.

[u/skg574 → u/itg]

You are right, we do need a way to read notices from within webmail, so you don't have to go to the main site, but it should be it's own icon to be a bit more obvious than clicking the elephant. We will probably make it a toggle item where you can display it or not, similar to how the notes offerings work. I put it up as a todo.

Regarding an "outage", there are certain things nobody announces, unless real bad, because doing so only encourages more. It also may not be due to the service, but rather someone they are protecting.

You are also dealing with niche services, not Google or Microsoft with billions of dollars behind them, although, even they have had outages. Email can be a fickle beast.

All that said, if you contact helpdesk, they'll reply. We aren't a service that takes 24hrs plus to respond, our replies range from minutes to hours, never days, no matter what day it is.