Based on their feature list, it stores your email addresses and passwords encrypted on their servers, with your inky account password being the decryption key. The idea being that you can just login to your inky account on any computer and it loads all your email accounts.
Going to give this a try... however it appears you do not have native exchange support?
I'm a bit skeptical of the UI though, so will need to give it a try. What looks good to a UI designer may not necessarily be a boon to my productivity. I.E. There is a lot of wasted screen real estate in the example image I see on the Home page, thus the info density of that email list is low.
Anyway - Ill give it a go and see what its like.
Will there be a mobile app to compliment? If I like the UX of this, maybe I'd want the same UX on my phone...
Re: information density: you can actually change the font size in the message list to get more rows visible. You can also opt for a paginated UI where the message list takes up the whole screen, and you only see the preview pane when you drill down.
Exchange worked for my University's exchange server, but my university appears to be running some kind of IMAP/SMTP gateway so "mortal devices" can connect to it. I don't know whether that's a common way of setting up Exhcange, but you might get lucky.
Adding Exchange Web Services support to an email client for the sake of supporting one extra server seems like a lot of extra work for very little benefit. Especially when that server can be configured to allow IMAP connections like the rest of the World uses.
This came out of nowhere and looks cool. What happened to http://dotmailapp.com by the way?
EDIT: WTF this is not Retina and when I hit Create Account, it freezes at "Inky is starting up" screen. I think app is not native, seems like it has a webview inside the application. I get Back&Forward options when I right click. LOL.
Would love to hear more about what it's really going to cost me. Ever since Sparrow stopped working as well as I wanted it to, and didn't seem to have any hope of improving, I've been back to gmail's web interface. How are they going to make money?
Totally stoked to have something new to check out in this space though. :)
I was planning on using it as the mail reader for a very active mailing list I'm a member of. It doesn't open up threads correctly, so I'm stuck going backwards and opening each individual message.
From the FAQ: "How much does Inky cost? It's free!"
How are you planning to make money? Coz if you don't make money, then either you are going to sell my data (not acceptable), or you are going to shut down future development.
Seeing as how the former option is the current precedent in software, they are probably going to sell your data.
In my opinion, this is totally "acceptable," and even preferable: my personal information is abundant, and is infinitely and trivially "replicable." My money is incredibly scarce and finite. (And being righteously indignant is too expensive.)
Edit: Also, I agree with the general sentiment that this should be a native app, not this wrappered pseudo-web app thing.
Ads. It's pretty clear if you read their TOS[1] or Privacy Policy[2]. In particular from the privacy policy:
>Arcode displays targeted advertisements based on personal information. Advertisers (including ad serving companies) may assume that people who interact with, view, or click targeted ads meet the targeting criteria, such as a particular gender, age group and geographic area.
They should add more info on email protocol support. It only says "Add Any Account", and mentions IMAP and POP. But it has a picture of an MSN Butterfly, is there deltasync or Exchange?
This looks neat. I've always wished I had a way to sign into all my email accounts without having to set them up individually one at a time. This app definitely needs some work though. It is crazy slow and appears to be a web-app-pretending-to-be-native. Not that that is necessarily bad, but this one seems slow. Also, I can't get it to work at all. I've got my email account set up and it knows how many unread messages I have, but it never loads them. It has been sitting like this for about 30 minutes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23745600/Screenshots/oxNi.png and restarting doesn't help.
I also can't for the life of me figure out how to add a second email address.
If it's a minimal cache, though, you might as well.
This is probably the single main concern I have about this -- I've spent chunks of time away from home where I find an internet cafe, sync up email (send and collect new email), and go -- then take the time to read and write email later (while offline). This method would be pretty broken if long conversations were missing most of their history.
If the vast majority of my email is actually unavailable when I'm offline (or experience connection problems, etc.) that at last partly defeats the purpose of having a native email client at all.
Glad to see a DC-area startup get a mention here on HN! I had the pleasure of meeting Dave (Inky's CEO) at a Microsoft meeting not too long ago. He's a real smart and friendly guy. I wish him and Inky great success.
the f_0000x files are different resources, the first one is a PNG file, the next few appear to be javascript. None of them however are archived or encrypted in any format.
Didn't work for me. Added account, and sent a welcome email, but I wasn't able to actually look at my inbox in the app.
Loaded folder structure correctly, but no actual emails.
I made an account, it worked okay, but it's just not as pretty or useful to me as the Win8 Mail app on my Desktop. Also looking for where to delete my account, but I can't find it...
Inky's sorting and filtering is easy, requiring only two controls in comparison to the complex table layouts seen in other email clients.
And yet, the complex table layouts are nowhere near sufficient for me, and I still get a couple hundred poorly-filtered emails daily. How does your two-control one handle a few thousand emails per day?
Probably not. Work at a small, software-based company and you end up dealing with lots of email, period. Server notifications, bug reports, user feedback, third-party service provider emails of all kinds, and all that happens before personal emails or ones between employees.
But, outside of that, my 5 accounts tend to get a few dozen per day, a handful more if I don't do any filtering. And they're specifically targeting people with multiple accounts. If this doesn't include work volumes, what does it include, and why do they have multiple accounts? It's not targeting the 99%, period, because it's not part of the OS or Office suite, so who are they targeting?
I've felt for a few years now that server notifications, bug reports, etc, should almost never go to email clients.
Sure you can use email to generate the ticket, but they need to go into a CRM / bug tracking system of some kind. Otherwise everyone ends up overwhelmed with meaningless repetitive emails, like it sounds is happening with you.
These are server notifications and bug reports that have gone through a couple bug tracking systems, and the new and/or exceptional exceptions generate emails. They (and I) could do better at filtering, and some tracking services are better than others, but it's one of those infinite time sinks that has generally not paid off beyond where I am now.
While great in theory, I haven't yet found a single bug tracker that provides reasonable deduplication that doesn't e.g. cause a new issue when the SLOC generating the error changes, just because you added a method to the class. Even allowing me to group two apparently-distinct bugs together manually would be an improvement, both for tracking history and severity, but I haven't found any. They're all too aggressive at grouping X, Y, and Z when they shouldn't, and make 20 piles of A. They are infinitely better than receiving an email for every single one, but still a headache, and they still generate too many false alarms to hook directly up to automated systems.
Then there's also that outright failures that need to immediately be fixed, and semi-unexpected things like insane responses from Facebook, are all useful to track. Unexpected rises in relatively normal Facebook errors can denote problems on either end, possibly fixable in some situations, while seeing a jump in quantity might imply something. If you don't track them continuously, you don't even know if it changes, so 'fixing' / suppressing them completely is hamstringing yourself. So ideally whatever I use would track fix-this-now and investigate-if-it-changes. I haven't found any that do.
Not that I've looked at too many, much less subjected them to large-enough workloads to be sure they're actually an improvement. Wiring up a new bug tracking and notification system (possibly from multiple sources and languages, and setting up paging when major problems happen, etc) is pretty non-trivial. But if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them, and might even try one or two out professionally this year :)
1. I tried adding my @outlook.com email address and I had to manually allow SMTP and POP3 servers. A newbie mom or dad user is not going to know what to do and ultimately dismiss your app. Make it much cleaner so it works "at once" with Outlook.com email addresses.
2. Scrolling is very slow and annoying. Can you make the scroll use the current default speed on my machine? (Using Windows 7 64 Bit)
I respectfully disagree about 1. Because of the autodetection, you can't be sure that the server you're connecting to is the right one. You have to double check this before you send your password to a potential attacker.
I don't think there should be special cases for certain email addresses. I think the instructions on what to do should just be as clear and detailed as possible.
So, uh, I guess we're not in stealth mode anymore...
I'm the founder; here are answers to some questions people have asked here. By way of background, I'm a hacker who (long ago) co-wrote Crash Bandicoot (1&2) and co-founded ITA Software, which was sold to Google in 2010.
Q: I'm really busy; why should I invest 5 minutes trying this?
A: Inky lets you sort your mail by relevance to you; you can train the ML algorithm, but it does a pretty good job for most users out of the box. Inky knows about many kinds of emails, like daily deals, social friend requests, etc., and lets you view these in special folders. Inky's design is minimalist, but don't be fooled: it is a real IMAP/POP client capable of doing virtually everything Thunderbird, etc. can -- and in some cases more (e.g., it makes adding new accounts trivial, and offers a unified inbox on the desktop). Finally, we've architected Inky to preserve your privacy: your email never touches our network, so our employees can't see your mail.
All that being said, you really need to try Inky for a few days to see what makes it (in our view) great. We've invested a lot of time, thought, and iteration into improving the core email reading experience. You'll see, after a while, that essential features that nobody really thinks about like account setup, recipient auto-complete, and unified inbox just work better in Inky.
Q: Is this web site packaged as a native app?
A: No. It is a native app with a portable UI built using web technologies. Many hackers assume that because it uses HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the UI, it's not running native code. It is; look in your process table. However, the same architecture does support deployment as a plain web site; that's part of the motivation for using web technologies for the UI.
Q: What do you mean it's cloud-enabled?
A: Inky stores your settings -- including authentication information for your mail servers -- in the cloud. This means that when you install Inky on a new computer and log in, it automatically knows about all your accounts. (Security wonks: please see our FAQ page or email us at hi@inky.com for how we do this safely.) Of course, your mail is also stored in the cloud; email is perhaps the oldest mainstream "cloud-based" service in this sense.
Q: It doesn't discover <major provider>!
A: That's a bug. Please report it to feedback@inky.com. Inky's auto-discovery will discover almost anything, including minor providers and mail servers people like me host themselves. But there are still bugs. Please help us find them by reporting them to us.
Q: It didn't work!
A: Please report this via feedback@inky.com (yes, we know it's ironic if you have to use another mail client to send the email). It does work for many people, but there are still bugs, and targets (e.g., WinXP) we don't support perfectly yet.
Q: The scrolling sucks!
A: We know; we're working on making the scrolling work natively.
Q: How are you planning to make money?
A: That's really putting the cart before the horse. We're focused on solving the fundamental problem, which is that email clients are dumb and complicated, when they should be getting smarter and simpler. There are many ways to make money in the email space; we're not worried about making money right now.
Q: But seriously: you're going to data-mine my email and sell the data, right?
A: No. Seriously. There are lots of ways to make money in the email space that don't involve systemic privacy invasion.
Q: I tried it, but <thing-I-don't-like>!
A: Please email us at <feedback@inky.com>. We're hardly out of alpha at this point and are focused primarily on fixing bugs. Email is complicated; our goals are ambitious; our team is small -- please help us by reporting specific bugs so we can fix whatever problems you encounter.
Q: What about mobile versions? What about exchange support? What about a Linux version? Retina support? Chat? Calendar? Doing my laundry?
A: We'd like to get the kinks out of the present desktop version before talking about major new ports. But, o...
Q: How are you planning to make money? A: That's really putting the cart before the horse. We're focused on solving the fundamental problem, which is that email clients are dumb and complicated, when they should be getting smarter and simpler. There are many ways to make money in the email space; we're not worried about making money right now.
Can you expand on this? I agree with your premise that email clients should be getting smarter and simpler (or at least I accept that as a valid premise). Really, though, how do you plan to make money? How do we know this won't disappear/be no longer supported in six months or a year when you get tired of not having any revenue?
This, precisely. What's in it for you? If you plan on keeping your product free for your users, then you are obviously planning on monetizing your users in a different way. I'm very curious to find out how exactly.
My previous company (ITA Software) made enough revenue to (rather comfortably) justify the ~$700M valuation Google paid for it. ITA never took in a single cent of advertising money or money derived from selling users' data to third parties.
I believe a vastly better email platform has inherent value, just like a vastly better travel planning system has inherent value. Look at the dozens of ways companies are currently earning their keep in the email sector. It's not the same as Twitter or Facebook, which only have usability value to consumers, and which can only succeed at massive scale.
It would seem like it since it has libcef which contains the definition for 'cef_browser_create'. Furthermore, it seems that they have added other Javascript libraries into it like CKEditor (http://ckeditor.com/)
Q: Any chance of providing a link to the Windows build from the not-supported message? I'd at least like to try running it under wine (unsupported and all), and I note that your Windows download div has a small link that lets you download the OS X dmg.
Since my other comment got downvoted for unknown reasons I'll attach the WARNING here again:
Be aware that Inky uploads your imap password to their servers (see their FAQ). This is probably due to incompetence rather than malice but if you care about your e-mail password you should refrain from installing this software. If you have already entered your imap password into Inky you should change it ASAP.
This would be nice to know, because they're serving as a password-management app for all of your email passwords.
Presumably, they would not store your Inky password as well -- instead, they'd store a secure hash, not MD5 or SHA-1, which are built for speed, not security....
It's more complicated than that. Please see my comments on security elsewhere in the thread. We store a password verifier object -- that's akin to a secure hash, but our authentication model offers better guarantees about protection from man-in-the-middle attacks.
That's meaningless. It opens a whole range of attack vectors for absolutely reason. No least your inky password (which they presumably use as the key). They allow a minimum length of 6 chars on that, which can be brute forced within hours on todays hardware.
They very clearly have no idea what they're doing (security-wise), consequently this is very likely not the only fatal flaw in their implementation.
Easy account sync between devices is a good enough reason for me. It can be implemented securely, so in general I don't see a problem. Hey, Google Chrome syncs saved passwords, online password vaults like LastPass do this too, are they security-incompetent too?
Don't know what hash function and encryption they use, but I think it's possible to pick/configure them so that brute-forcing even 6-character passwords is impractical.
If you're willing to gamble your imap password on their undocumented process then that's fine.
I posted my warning because I think most users are not even aware that they're sending their password to inky and the implied risk. Also inky does nothing to educate them (a handwavy marketing-blurb buried in the FAQ does not count).
Sorry but comparing inky to LastPass and Google is laughable. Google is trusted because it's Google. LastPass is trusted because their process is extensively documented. If you plan to casually juggle your users crown jewels for a convenience-feature then you'd better fit into one of these two categories.
Client side encryption is only useful when the application is open source. Otherwise, we've no idea if there is a back door in the application and a signal that their servers can send back to the client to inform it to send over all of your login details.
Hushmail were forced by their government to backdoor their system for this purpose. What's stopping the same thing from happening to Inky?
Wait. You co-wrote two of the best games ever and now you built a mail client? Ah well, choices in life :) I'll try Inky just because of your credentials. Although it's probably futile; basically the only email client able to handle my 29 gb, ~20 year old inbox is Gmail, the rest (cloud or desktop) just loads forever after importing.
Many people ferociously criticized Crash Bandicoot when it launched in 1996 as well; people just don't remember that.
Please let us know how Inky works for your huge inbox. Like you, some of us (including me) have enormous inboxes, and we've worked hard to make Inky's indexing use very little resources on your box.
I didn't know it in '96; I got to know it much later when I picked up a PS1 on queensday in the Netherlands; it included Crash 1 & 3 and I've been a huge fan ever since (I own all Crashs on all platforms). I play it on my openpandora a lot. For me (and a lot of people I know) the gameplay is better than most stuff out there now.
I'll definitely try Inky :) I'll let you know how it goes.
Inky connected to imap.gmail.com using IMAP, but authentication could not complete.
port 993 using TLS: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
If you have another email account, please add it to Inky, try to discover your GMail account again, and "Report a Problem" using the menu in the lower left corner. Obviously GMail should discover properly; this is a bug.
It's laggy at the first run. and I don't under stand why I must sign up then log in to add my mail accounts?
Like BIS (my good old Blackberry ), I am in China, and be told the BIS service of China Mobile, they will store your email in the database, in plain text. I can't be sure if this is true, though I did not doubt too much. So, as a desktop app, if means "sign up" then will store my email contents on your server? and how about my emails' passwords?
I love the UI but the icons are ugly, I believe you will change them before long.
when I first time to input my gmail address it poped up some dialog warned me that my gmail account was not recognized(?), and suggested me to enable my gmail's IMAP option, of course it's already enabled for years. so I ignored that and entered my password and connected, it also lag a little while, then things went well.
I really don't want to see ads, but that's preferable over selling my data for a free option. I'd still recommend you give people an ad-free trial (and please make the trial only count days you actually open the app, like Beyond Compare). I'm a free software guy at heart, so the more generous you are with your trial, the more willing I feel to turn a blind eye to opening my wallet for software. Suggestions for how I'd be willing to pay:
1) $20-40/yr for a web service. Most of the world is Windows, so if I'm on the go without my OS X laptop, my phone has died, and I want to check my email I'd have to remember my other email passwords to login to their own services after I got in the habit of using Inky... that wouldn't be good. I'd still want data security, so I'd expect any data that hits your servers to be strongly encrypted in a manner similar to SpiderOak's approach (though I'd prefer Scrypt over PBKDF2). If you open-sourced your client and just sold the service I'd pay more.
2) $50 for the app itself. Less if you want me to pay every year for upgrades.
Thanks -- this is helpful feedback. We agree that Inky will be be most useful when it's available on "all screens," and we're working towards that goal. The architecture is designed with that specific goal in mind.
Great. I gave this some more thought and what I'd actually like, along with a great universal experience, is an email provider that I can really trust. Or rather, an email provider that I don't have to trust. By that I mean that it'd be great if I could get all of my email through Inky and that I'd have the option of having you keep a strongly encrypted copy of those emails while deleting the emails you collect from external providers' servers.
I could have my email everywhere with less worry over wanton snooping over my email archives this way. That would be a very valuable service.
It might require some compromise on data security if I wanted to be able to perform search on my archive via the web service though. Perhaps for people who are willing to give up zero-knowledge you could upsell a service which allows the data to be decrypted server-side in an in-memory store while they're logged in only. I'd be happy without search when using a browser client though.
I can only say that, as a matter of company culture, we are committed to being trustworthy. That's the part of the rationale for "safe" in our "smart, simple, safe" motto. We hope to earn your trust over the coming months.
The only features I need an email client to have is extreme speed and nice search. No desktop clients for mac have both right now. This isn't fast enough but i'll keep it installed and check for updates in a month.
If you want a commandline mail indexer, Notmuch has both. It's like Mutt but it uses a fulltext database (Xapian), so it's super fast (eg. subsecond fulltext searches on my 80k emails).
Command line though, and you need to pick a frontend. Definitely not for everyone. http://notmuchmail.org/
Here are my first impressions as a keyboard-heavy email user:
* Created account and added my google apps account. Detection worked well.
* Tried to switch to my google apps inbox by pressing Cmd-2 like twitter clients and other apps with a left bar. No dice.
* Pressed '?' to see a hotkey popup. No dice.
* Pressed 'c' to compose a new message. That worked.
* Tried to figure out how to get back to the inbox. Had to use the mouse.
* Scrolled down, it was slow.
* Closed and reopened inky, and apparently it's not taking my password (20 characters long and containing the characters ";*{~?").
I have no idea what my password is actually set to (it seems to have accepted the password but modified it before saving?) and can't log in anymore. Which is fine, because inky's not for me. Lots of promise I think, but the UI is just not responsive enough yet, and I'm pretty happy with GMail's web UI.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadI'm a bit skeptical of the UI though, so will need to give it a try. What looks good to a UI designer may not necessarily be a boon to my productivity. I.E. There is a lot of wasted screen real estate in the example image I see on the Home page, thus the info density of that email list is low.
Anyway - Ill give it a go and see what its like.
Will there be a mobile app to compliment? If I like the UX of this, maybe I'd want the same UX on my phone...
EDIT: WTF this is not Retina and when I hit Create Account, it freezes at "Inky is starting up" screen. I think app is not native, seems like it has a webview inside the application. I get Back&Forward options when I right click. LOL.
Totally stoked to have something new to check out in this space though. :)
The design is nice though.
How are you planning to make money? Coz if you don't make money, then either you are going to sell my data (not acceptable), or you are going to shut down future development.
So again, how are you planning to make money?
Found this: http://us.linkedin.com/company/arcode
Looks like they are going to make their money by improving the email user experience.
In my opinion, this is totally "acceptable," and even preferable: my personal information is abundant, and is infinitely and trivially "replicable." My money is incredibly scarce and finite. (And being righteously indignant is too expensive.)
Edit: Also, I agree with the general sentiment that this should be a native app, not this wrappered pseudo-web app thing.
>Arcode displays targeted advertisements based on personal information. Advertisers (including ad serving companies) may assume that people who interact with, view, or click targeted ads meet the targeting criteria, such as a particular gender, age group and geographic area.
[1] http://inky.com/termsofuse.html [2] http://inky.com/privacypolicy.html
I also can't for the life of me figure out how to add a second email address.
This is probably the single main concern I have about this -- I've spent chunks of time away from home where I find an internet cafe, sync up email (send and collect new email), and go -- then take the time to read and write email later (while offline). This method would be pretty broken if long conversations were missing most of their history.
If the vast majority of my email is actually unavailable when I'm offline (or experience connection problems, etc.) that at last partly defeats the purpose of having a native email client at all.
It looks like JavaScript files are archived (maybe encrypted?) in binary files, resources.dat, f_0000a-f_00009, and maybe in data_0-data_3.
Anybody wants to take a look?
Looking for where I can delete my account.
Inky's sorting and filtering is easy, requiring only two controls in comparison to the complex table layouts seen in other email clients.
And yet, the complex table layouts are nowhere near sufficient for me, and I still get a couple hundred poorly-filtered emails daily. How does your two-control one handle a few thousand emails per day?
A few thousand emails per day?
You're sooooo the target demographic.
They'll be able to show you ads for products able to deal with the problem that getting thousands emails per day is ; )
Seriously: you're 0.000000000001% of the people using email and I don't think they should focus first on solving your issues ; )
But, outside of that, my 5 accounts tend to get a few dozen per day, a handful more if I don't do any filtering. And they're specifically targeting people with multiple accounts. If this doesn't include work volumes, what does it include, and why do they have multiple accounts? It's not targeting the 99%, period, because it's not part of the OS or Office suite, so who are they targeting?
Sure you can use email to generate the ticket, but they need to go into a CRM / bug tracking system of some kind. Otherwise everyone ends up overwhelmed with meaningless repetitive emails, like it sounds is happening with you.
While great in theory, I haven't yet found a single bug tracker that provides reasonable deduplication that doesn't e.g. cause a new issue when the SLOC generating the error changes, just because you added a method to the class. Even allowing me to group two apparently-distinct bugs together manually would be an improvement, both for tracking history and severity, but I haven't found any. They're all too aggressive at grouping X, Y, and Z when they shouldn't, and make 20 piles of A. They are infinitely better than receiving an email for every single one, but still a headache, and they still generate too many false alarms to hook directly up to automated systems.
Then there's also that outright failures that need to immediately be fixed, and semi-unexpected things like insane responses from Facebook, are all useful to track. Unexpected rises in relatively normal Facebook errors can denote problems on either end, possibly fixable in some situations, while seeing a jump in quantity might imply something. If you don't track them continuously, you don't even know if it changes, so 'fixing' / suppressing them completely is hamstringing yourself. So ideally whatever I use would track fix-this-now and investigate-if-it-changes. I haven't found any that do.
Not that I've looked at too many, much less subjected them to large-enough workloads to be sure they're actually an improvement. Wiring up a new bug tracking and notification system (possibly from multiple sources and languages, and setting up paging when major problems happen, etc) is pretty non-trivial. But if you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them, and might even try one or two out professionally this year :)
1. I tried adding my @outlook.com email address and I had to manually allow SMTP and POP3 servers. A newbie mom or dad user is not going to know what to do and ultimately dismiss your app. Make it much cleaner so it works "at once" with Outlook.com email addresses.
2. Scrolling is very slow and annoying. Can you make the scroll use the current default speed on my machine? (Using Windows 7 64 Bit)
3. Visual bug in the search bar area: http://i.imgur.com/ybO7G.png
4. Clicked on an email and it's stuck on Retrieving for a very long time... still stuck there... :(
5. BREAKING BUG: I added my Outlook.com email and get this notification:
pop3.live.com told Inky this: "-ERR Exceeded the login limit for a 15 minute period. Reduce the frequency of requests to the POP3 server.."
I'm the founder; here are answers to some questions people have asked here. By way of background, I'm a hacker who (long ago) co-wrote Crash Bandicoot (1&2) and co-founded ITA Software, which was sold to Google in 2010.
Q: I'm really busy; why should I invest 5 minutes trying this? A: Inky lets you sort your mail by relevance to you; you can train the ML algorithm, but it does a pretty good job for most users out of the box. Inky knows about many kinds of emails, like daily deals, social friend requests, etc., and lets you view these in special folders. Inky's design is minimalist, but don't be fooled: it is a real IMAP/POP client capable of doing virtually everything Thunderbird, etc. can -- and in some cases more (e.g., it makes adding new accounts trivial, and offers a unified inbox on the desktop). Finally, we've architected Inky to preserve your privacy: your email never touches our network, so our employees can't see your mail.
All that being said, you really need to try Inky for a few days to see what makes it (in our view) great. We've invested a lot of time, thought, and iteration into improving the core email reading experience. You'll see, after a while, that essential features that nobody really thinks about like account setup, recipient auto-complete, and unified inbox just work better in Inky.
Q: Is this web site packaged as a native app? A: No. It is a native app with a portable UI built using web technologies. Many hackers assume that because it uses HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the UI, it's not running native code. It is; look in your process table. However, the same architecture does support deployment as a plain web site; that's part of the motivation for using web technologies for the UI.
Q: What do you mean it's cloud-enabled? A: Inky stores your settings -- including authentication information for your mail servers -- in the cloud. This means that when you install Inky on a new computer and log in, it automatically knows about all your accounts. (Security wonks: please see our FAQ page or email us at hi@inky.com for how we do this safely.) Of course, your mail is also stored in the cloud; email is perhaps the oldest mainstream "cloud-based" service in this sense.
Q: It doesn't discover <major provider>! A: That's a bug. Please report it to feedback@inky.com. Inky's auto-discovery will discover almost anything, including minor providers and mail servers people like me host themselves. But there are still bugs. Please help us find them by reporting them to us.
Q: It didn't work! A: Please report this via feedback@inky.com (yes, we know it's ironic if you have to use another mail client to send the email). It does work for many people, but there are still bugs, and targets (e.g., WinXP) we don't support perfectly yet.
Q: The scrolling sucks! A: We know; we're working on making the scrolling work natively.
Q: How are you planning to make money? A: That's really putting the cart before the horse. We're focused on solving the fundamental problem, which is that email clients are dumb and complicated, when they should be getting smarter and simpler. There are many ways to make money in the email space; we're not worried about making money right now.
Q: But seriously: you're going to data-mine my email and sell the data, right? A: No. Seriously. There are lots of ways to make money in the email space that don't involve systemic privacy invasion.
Q: I tried it, but <thing-I-don't-like>! A: Please email us at <feedback@inky.com>. We're hardly out of alpha at this point and are focused primarily on fixing bugs. Email is complicated; our goals are ambitious; our team is small -- please help us by reporting specific bugs so we can fix whatever problems you encounter.
Q: What about mobile versions? What about exchange support? What about a Linux version? Retina support? Chat? Calendar? Doing my laundry? A: We'd like to get the kinks out of the present desktop version before talking about major new ports. But, o...
Could you give us a bit more details on the ML algorithm ? How is supposed to work and measure ?
Can you expand on this? I agree with your premise that email clients should be getting smarter and simpler (or at least I accept that as a valid premise). Really, though, how do you plan to make money? How do we know this won't disappear/be no longer supported in six months or a year when you get tired of not having any revenue?
Which is, not-so-coincidentally, why my next project is 100% open source.
I believe a vastly better email platform has inherent value, just like a vastly better travel planning system has inherent value. Look at the dozens of ways companies are currently earning their keep in the email sector. It's not the same as Twitter or Facebook, which only have usability value to consumers, and which can only succeed at massive scale.
Is it http://inky.com/mail/ wrapped around with Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), with web page javascript calling native Python scripts?
spoygg@Yggdrasill ~> wine --version wine-1.5.19 spoygg@Yggdrasill ~> cat /etc/*-release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
Be aware that Inky uploads your imap password to their servers (see their FAQ). This is probably due to incompetence rather than malice but if you care about your e-mail password you should refrain from installing this software. If you have already entered your imap password into Inky you should change it ASAP.
Presumably, they would not store your Inky password as well -- instead, they'd store a secure hash, not MD5 or SHA-1, which are built for speed, not security....
They very clearly have no idea what they're doing (security-wise), consequently this is very likely not the only fatal flaw in their implementation.
I posted my warning because I think most users are not even aware that they're sending their password to inky and the implied risk. Also inky does nothing to educate them (a handwavy marketing-blurb buried in the FAQ does not count).
Sorry but comparing inky to LastPass and Google is laughable. Google is trusted because it's Google. LastPass is trusted because their process is extensively documented. If you plan to casually juggle your users crown jewels for a convenience-feature then you'd better fit into one of these two categories.
Hushmail were forced by their government to backdoor their system for this purpose. What's stopping the same thing from happening to Inky?
Please let us know how Inky works for your huge inbox. Like you, some of us (including me) have enormous inboxes, and we've worked hard to make Inky's indexing use very little resources on your box.
I'll definitely try Inky :) I'll let you know how it goes.
Like BIS (my good old Blackberry ), I am in China, and be told the BIS service of China Mobile, they will store your email in the database, in plain text. I can't be sure if this is true, though I did not doubt too much. So, as a desktop app, if means "sign up" then will store my email contents on your server? and how about my emails' passwords?
I love the UI but the icons are ugly, I believe you will change them before long.
when I first time to input my gmail address it poped up some dialog warned me that my gmail account was not recognized(?), and suggested me to enable my gmail's IMAP option, of course it's already enabled for years. so I ignored that and entered my password and connected, it also lag a little while, then things went well.
1) $20-40/yr for a web service. Most of the world is Windows, so if I'm on the go without my OS X laptop, my phone has died, and I want to check my email I'd have to remember my other email passwords to login to their own services after I got in the habit of using Inky... that wouldn't be good. I'd still want data security, so I'd expect any data that hits your servers to be strongly encrypted in a manner similar to SpiderOak's approach (though I'd prefer Scrypt over PBKDF2). If you open-sourced your client and just sold the service I'd pay more. 2) $50 for the app itself. Less if you want me to pay every year for upgrades.
I could have my email everywhere with less worry over wanton snooping over my email archives this way. That would be a very valuable service.
It might require some compromise on data security if I wanted to be able to perform search on my archive via the web service though. Perhaps for people who are willing to give up zero-knowledge you could upsell a service which allows the data to be decrypted server-side in an in-memory store while they're logged in only. I'd be happy without search when using a browser client though.
[1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
Command line though, and you need to pick a frontend. Definitely not for everyone. http://notmuchmail.org/
* Created account and added my google apps account. Detection worked well.
* Tried to switch to my google apps inbox by pressing Cmd-2 like twitter clients and other apps with a left bar. No dice.
* Pressed '?' to see a hotkey popup. No dice.
* Pressed 'c' to compose a new message. That worked.
* Tried to figure out how to get back to the inbox. Had to use the mouse.
* Scrolled down, it was slow.
* Closed and reopened inky, and apparently it's not taking my password (20 characters long and containing the characters ";*{~?").
I have no idea what my password is actually set to (it seems to have accepted the password but modified it before saving?) and can't log in anymore. Which is fine, because inky's not for me. Lots of promise I think, but the UI is just not responsive enough yet, and I'm pretty happy with GMail's web UI.