Before the web, there were bulletin board systems. You dialled a number, a modem answered, and you were inside somebody's computer — reading messages, leaving replies, part of a small community that existed because one person decided to host it.
Joel Gathercole was that person. He ran his own BBS in the 1990s. Not a service he subscribed to: a system he operated. He was responsible for the hardware, the uptime, the users, and every message stored on the drive. When something broke at 1am, there was no support ticket — there was him.
That is an unusual place to start a career, and it leaves a permanent mark. The default assumption for most people today is that email is something you rent from a giant company that reads it. Joel's default assumption, formed before that was even possible, is that communications are infrastructure you own.
The professional half of the argument came later. From 2006 to 2026 he served at TriageLogic, rising from external VoIP provider to Head of IT to Director of IT, where securing communications was a core responsibility on systems carrying highly sensitive patient data. Two decades of that teaches you exactly which questions matter: where does this actually sit, who can access it, under whose laws, and what happens when the provider changes their terms.
For Canadian small businesses, those answers are usually uncomfortable. Most business email sold in Canada is hosted on US infrastructure under US jurisdiction. Your client conversations, your quotes, your contracts, your entire commercial history sits on servers governed by a legal framework you have no vote in — and is frequently scanned to improve products you never asked for.
MapleMail is the alternative. Canadian business email hosted on Canadian infrastructure by Joel & Nanz Inc. Your own domain, your own mailboxes, proper deliverability configuration — SPF, DKIM, DMARC set up correctly so your mail actually lands in inboxes rather than spam folders. No scanning your mail to sell you things. No jurisdictional surprise buried in a terms-of-service update.
It is also built by someone who runs it himself. Joel & Nanz Inc. operates its own mail infrastructure, and Joel is the architect who configures, monitors and repairs it — the same posture he had as a teenage sysop, only with 20 years of enterprise security practice layered on top.
Thirty years separate the BBS from MapleMail, and the underlying idea has not changed at all. Somebody has to host the community. It might as well be someone who is accountable to you, operating in your country, under your laws.
MapleMail is part of the MapleWorkSuite ecosystem from Joel & Nanz Inc., built in New Brunswick for Canadian SMBs who would rather own their communications than rent them.