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 [email protected] 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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected] (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 <[email protected]>. 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, of course, your email client is most useful when it runs seamlessly across all your devices, and syncs with all your favorite providers.
Q: Are you just going to be acquired by Google and get shut down?
A: No. This is about fixing email; it's not about building something to flip. My last company fixed travel search, and it took 10+ years. (Assuming you even consider it done, which I'm sure the 500+ employees at ITA Software do not.)
Q: I would like to know how it works.
A: We will talk more about the architecture and tool chain, which are somewhat novel, at some point later.
Q: Why did you launch if there are still bugs?
A: We didn't. People found us hiding in plain view.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are some clarifying points on security issues. We wrote up a FAQ for the website, but it's not in the prod version of the site yet. Short version: we really care about this stuff, have worked with cryptography and other security experts, and are happy to explain what we're doing. The analogy to LastPass elsewhere in this thread is apt; our techniques are similar and we'll document what we're doing so you can evaluate them. Here's a thumbnail version:
Inky uses SRP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol) to authenticate to the server that stores your credentials. This means that Inky proves to the server that you know your password without actually sending any bits of the password. Deriving the password from the stored password verifier object is thought to be a computationally hard problem, in a similar (number-theoretic) sense that, say, RSA is thought to be hard to break without knowing the password.
Your IMAP/POP passwords and other secure information are encrypted with a key derived from your Inky password. Since we don't know the Inky password, we don't know your IMAP/POP passwords. To add entropy to the encryption key, we use PBKDF2 key stretching. (As an aside: we can't reset your password since we don't know it; that's why we let you set up security question that lets you reset it from that machine only)
About not warning about self-signed certificates: this is obviously a trade-off between on-boarding simplicity and security. When you approve connecting to a site (which we tell you involves sending your password), you implicitly accept the site's X.509 certificate if it fails to validate. From that point on, however, we require the signature to match the certificate you accepted when you added the account; otherwise, we won't connect and we'll put up a warning. I'm personally interested in Tervor Perrin's work on TACK as an alternative to the well-known problems with the TLS trust hierarchy. (These problems have been discussed here extensively.)
Thank you for clarifying this. Your notes make me feel much better about sending you my password, and I'm glad you thought about self-signed SSL certificates too.
I still would like a warning to show up before I allow connecting to the server if it presents a self-signed certificate. Even something like this could get the point across:
+------------------------------------------+
| ======= Inky security warning ===========|
+------------------------------------------+
| Nobody's verified the identity of the |
| people who operate this mail server. Are |
| you sure you want to send your password |
| to this unknown mail server? |
| |
| [Yes, send my password, and remember |
| this mail server's fingerprint in the |
| future] |
| |
| [No, do not continue] |
| |
| [More details...] |
+------------------------------------------+
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
- The interface is very clean and very intriguing. I find myself going "I wonder how the decided to do that ... didn't think I'd like it, but it seems to work alright"
- I wish you chose a more attractive font to render emails in. My emails looked alright in postbox but they look crappy in Inky :\
- I would ask that you offer the option to set the threshold at which we "Automatically add recipients of sent messages to the address book". email clients over the years have made my contacts completely worthless with this email-once-add-to-contacts-feature because there are tons of people I email once or twice and never speak to again, but at some point (5 emails in perhaps) ... its a good idea to add that person to your contacts.
- memory usage is about 327MB (Real memory column on OSX), we'll see how it does in the next week or so. Postbox is at 815MB, which is one of the reasons I've fallen out of love with it ... that and the Postbox team's seeming mindset that they've gone as far as they can with it.
- Will also to see how big the index size gets, and how it impacts my cpu usage. Postbox uses 10GB of storage for my 3 email accounts and has my cpu fan constantly blowing hard on cpu idle.
Good first impression. Its seems like a decent email client right now, but I Can't wait to see if you can actually do something truly mindblowing/innovative with it
I'm the founder of Peek, where we made a mobile device/app for doing email better. The main comparison at the time was Blackberry and eventually Android. We were a low cost smartphone centered on email and stuff. So with that backdrop, some comments.
<pre>
TRIED IT, LIKE IT
- hosted gmail account - set up easily for me
- sucked in my mail fast too
- prioritized the inbox pretty ok, but will have to try in the AM when I have more BS mail not just late night 'real' mail
- UI is a little slow I guess. You need a ? shortcut to prompt keyboard shortcuts
- I like the approach: just be an alternative UI to the gmail engine. You can coast on their infrastructure. Others are doing this too like Handle, AltoMail, others
TAKE IT FROM ME...
- Peek also got constantly dinged to "hey, support Exchange!" but we never got far with corporate users even when we bent over backwards to support them
- gmail was the vast majority of users
- outlook/hotmail is actually large and super annoying to support. you need a special partnership license with msft and we went and got one. email me if you want help/access. amol at peek dot ly
- yahoo you can use imap back door. also very large
- power users: we were a cheap, simple gadget so power users would criticize us on the one hand but then not use us since they weren't going to abandon their blackberry anyway (or android, later). In this case though, it seems Inky needs to work well for power users. So this performance stuff people are complaining about needs to be better
SUGGESTIONS
- weird that you didn't start with a mobile app
- a bit weird to create a 'desktop client' that is actually just a web app container (that's what it is right?)
- efforts like thunderbird or postbox at least "get your mail on your pc" which has a neat quality to it. Inky doesn't do that. What's the advantage of being a desktop app here?
- the overall betterness of Inky isn't apparent. The UI does resemble the "3.0" looks of a bunch of other mail apps as commenters have mentioned. There are some usability tweaks but also some steps back. I am most excited about the relevance and smart views -- this is the area nobody is doing well yet. The "algo for your email". I guess I need to use it more to see this benefit?
</pre>
I'm excited to find my next mail client. I really don't like Gmail and the death of Thunderbird was sad for me. I want you guys to make something awesome!
Thanks for the shout-out. It's always nice to hear from someone else who's crossed the email Rubicon. Can't disagree with any of your advice. (Did you try to add a Yahoo! account?)
I was about to register for an account, but after I read that it stores my authentication information in the cloud I've held out. I just don't feel comparable with that, so I've decided not to do it. It would be great if there was an option, not to do this.
"capable of doing virtually everything Thunderbird, etc. can -- and in some cases more"
Dude, just no. Don't be one of those founders. Don't get drunk off your own Koolaid. I'm a heavy daily thunderbird user with 10 accounts and at this point in time, with this release, Thunderbird literally does everything better than Inky. Everything. From account setup, to available options, to information density, plugins, sorting collumn options, UI and collumn flexibility, customization, massive options, and about 35 other things. Email is broken not because it isn't pretty, it's broken because there's too much email, too much spam, and a lack of good threading. Common let's be honest, you made email pretty. You mac-afied it. Took out Spam filter and replaced it with Relevant/Not Relevant.
Your design, name, logo, URL are amazing.
However, Inky couldn't connect to my custom domain inboxes like [email protected] and hangs on the "discover settings" page even after I specify the pop and smtp settings. Gmail works fine though. I'm sure you'll fix that quick so I'm not judging you on it.
Also, Inky has a bad case of the "looks over functionality" flu and "hide everything off the screen and call it minimalization" disease that's been going around. Information density is really low. Every message takes up too much space. With thunderbird my inbox fills up my whole monitor and I could skim through my entire inbox in 15 seconds. With Inky every little message takes up so much visual room it takes forever to check my mail. And everything takes more clicks than usual to complete. And clickable icons like checkboxes etc... are too small.
Not to mention, where is the spam button?
If you sing on your own merrits you'll always find fans, but when you compare yourself to Whitney Houston you're just asking for a backlash. Likewise, had you not compared Inky to Thunderbird you would have been fine.
It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
*That form ever follows function*. This is the law. [1]
Not a big fan of the UI itself, or performance after sign up, at least as it is right now. The only element which seems visually distinct to me is the far left menubar; everything else kind of blends together in a too-widely-spaced collection of random boxes, not even lists. I like native OS widgets. This isn't a video game, don't make me figure out some new convention just to scroll a list.
Search is nice (which is the only reason I still use anything on gmail). Inspires me to try to get lucerne working on my own mail again.
Also not really a fan of giving my login credentials to a cloud service for no particular reason. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to keep them within a client only, and just go through the setup each time.
Realistically I'm unlikely to move off mutt (for intensive email use) or gmail (for infrequent use from other machines), but I'll try it again someday.
You lost me at "email is broken". Email isn't perfect, but contending "The system is broken, so we built another layer on top of it" makes me think you haven't given this a lot of thought.
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.
I really don't like the trend of apps installing to the user profile. Chrome does this too, and I think it's a mistake.
I'm still using Thunderbird because I can't find a nice client with true threading (not the 'conversation threading' that seems to be popular recently). This client appears to be no exception.
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.
TL;DR: Devs, please read below for my SSL concerns. Everyone else, give Inky a try; it's a surprisingly nice and full-featured email client hiding behind a deceptively simple UI.
I'll bite. I'm a sysadmin who gets gobs of email per day. Maybe I'm not part of your target market ("Simple! Just works!"), but I'll offer my thoughts in hopes that they're useful.
I've tried it for a bit. Here's what I like about Inky as a mail client:
- Vi default keyboard shortcuts :)
- The dialog for adding arbitrary IMAP servers is outstanding. Leagues better than Thunderbird. For those who haven't tried it, you type in your email address, then it looks up the servers in the MX records of the email's hostname. You click an "Allow" button next to the server that you actually intended to send your password to, and it starts using that server. Excellent.
- AUTOMATIC UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON. Dude. Maybe this is common in other mail clients but I just spent like ten minutes unsubscribing myself from useless things. Click, click, click. It's catharsis in a box. This alone made my brief spin with Inky worth my time.
- Nice UI for viewing and editing settings. Surprisingly advanced options for eg. caching, displaying and downloading messages, keyboard shortcuts, and so on hidden in the settings.
- Didn't interfere with my other email clients, as promised.
Security issues that I don't like:
- You didn't even warn me when I added my mail server with a self-signed SSL certificate. Sure, the UI does imply that you're not sending my password to that server before I click the "Allow" button, but there's no way for me to even check the SSL certificate fingerprint before I do that.
- You also didn't let me know whether I'm using an SSL/TLS connection at all.
I expect any decent email client to loudly complain about security issues like these. Inky is a broken email client until it does so.
- Storing my IMAP password on your cloud server is not OK. I know my passwords are encrypted with my Inky password, but that's exactly what I'm sending you whenever I log into my Inky account. Thus, Inky employees can access my email if they watch me authenticate with your servers. I'm not convinced. You've ensured that adding new mail accounts is stupid easy, so why are you "helpfully" keeping a copy of my password for me? At least give me the option of storing passwords in my OS keyring. I'd like to know more about the security of this system and your motivations for doing this.
UI things that I don't like:
- Bug: I add a server, then I click on "Compose message," then I add another server, then click back to my message that I previously started to compose. You don't list the new second server in the "From:" dropdown menu, so I thought I didn't add the new outgoing server properly. I have to scrap that message and start composing a new one before both servers show up in the "From:" dropdown.
- You treat an email thread as a linear list of messages. Email threads have inherent hierarchy and structure. I can't see who's replying to who without expanding the quoted parts.
- You group emails together by subject. I have 1,000 nightly automated server emails per each server accumulated over the past five years. Please don't group them together like that.
- In mailing lists, it's conventional to have "Reply All" as the default action, not just "Reply." I'd love if you detected that.
- Please infer my address book from people in my inbox who sent me things. I don't want to type all that again, and it looks like there's no visible way for me to import contacts. Slurping up contact details when I send messages to people would also help with this.
- In threaded email lists, there's so much whitespace that I can't tell where a message ends and where the next one begins. For example, how many emails are visible on the right side of this screenshot? http://i.imgur.com/92cKQ.png
- There's also way too much whitespace in the message list. I could only see 10 messages in my screenshot, which really hurts when I'm scanning through search results. (EDIT: I accidentally clicked on the date header and it gives you more layout options to condense things down)
- This is currently a free product. How are you making money?
It doesn't work on Linux, so I can't use it day-to-day. That said, I really like what you're doing here, and it's certainly a great start. Until then, I'm headed back to Notmuch ( http://notmuchmail.org/ ) for the time being.
Im interested in this space as well so I am curious to poke your brain for a bit, if you dont mind:
> you type in your email address, then it looks up the servers in the MX records of the email's hostname
The MX records store the server receiving mail (i.e. an smtp server). How does this relate to the imap server?
> AUTOMATIC UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON
This sounds interesting, but how would this work? Often times there are forms that the unsubscribe link leads to, how would it be able to correctly populate and send it?
Furthermore, in my experience, these links dont usually work and the better solution is to forward all mail from that source directly to junk mail. Is your experience different?
> Nice UI for viewing and editing settings. Surprisingly advanced options for eg. caching ...
Do you actually use these? Do you really care how long a message is cached for? I feel like most of these confuse the average user (obviously not you) and provide little value for the more advanced users.
> Didn't interfere with my other email clients, as promised
Is this an issue? How does this happen?
> You didn't even warn me when...
What is the average users response to such a warning? Heck, would you know if there were a man in the middle given the warning? I think that this is one of the shortcomings of the PKI: most warnings are false alarms which lead to mistrusting the system.
Thanks; this is great feedback. A couple responses:
- See security comments elsewhere. Inky does not send our servers your Inky password.
- Grouping emails by subject: email threading information is pretty broken in practice; many clients don't populate References: properly, and Outlook uses its own thing called Thread-Id. So we have to use heuristics in many cases.
- Email thread structure: you're the only person who's ever asked us for this. GMail's pretty much killed real threading as a design.
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.
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.
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.
Small nit: auto-discovery doesn't ask for your full name, so outbound emails headers will not include your name, which (in addition to looking woefully unprofessional) also is a spam trigger.
Fancy suggestion, related: since [email protected] seems to be a convention these days, consider automatically setting the user's full name during auto-discovery if it conforms to that syntax.
Thanks for the feedback. When you compose a message, if you don't have a full name set, Inky will suggest some options. We didn't prompt for full name during the on-boarding process simply to streamline things.
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply
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 [email protected] 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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected] (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 <[email protected]>. 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, of course, your email client is most useful when it runs seamlessly across all your devices, and syncs with all your favorite providers.
Q: Are you just going to be acquired by Google and get shut down? A: No. This is about fixing email; it's not about building something to flip. My last company fixed travel search, and it took 10+ years. (Assuming you even consider it done, which I'm sure the 500+ employees at ITA Software do not.)
Q: I would like to know how it works. A: We will talk more about the architecture and tool chain, which are somewhat novel, at some point later.
Q: Why did you launch if there are still bugs? A: We didn't. People found us hiding in plain view.
[+] [-] moe|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] est|13 years ago|reply
Is it http://inky.com/mail/ wrapped around with Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), with web page javascript calling native Python scripts?
[+] [-] tluyben2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readme|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entrode|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shellehs|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cbhl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_macgregor|13 years ago|reply
Could you give us a bit more details on the ML algorithm ? How is supposed to work and measure ?
[+] [-] JoelMarsh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gulbrandr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply
Inky uses SRP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol) to authenticate to the server that stores your credentials. This means that Inky proves to the server that you know your password without actually sending any bits of the password. Deriving the password from the stored password verifier object is thought to be a computationally hard problem, in a similar (number-theoretic) sense that, say, RSA is thought to be hard to break without knowing the password.
Your IMAP/POP passwords and other secure information are encrypted with a key derived from your Inky password. Since we don't know the Inky password, we don't know your IMAP/POP passwords. To add entropy to the encryption key, we use PBKDF2 key stretching. (As an aside: we can't reset your password since we don't know it; that's why we let you set up security question that lets you reset it from that machine only)
About not warning about self-signed certificates: this is obviously a trade-off between on-boarding simplicity and security. When you approve connecting to a site (which we tell you involves sending your password), you implicitly accept the site's X.509 certificate if it fails to validate. From that point on, however, we require the signature to match the certificate you accepted when you added the account; otherwise, we won't connect and we'll put up a warning. I'm personally interested in Tervor Perrin's work on TACK as an alternative to the well-known problems with the TLS trust hierarchy. (These problems have been discussed here extensively.)
[+] [-] gcr|13 years ago|reply
I still would like a warning to show up before I allow connecting to the server if it presents a self-signed certificate. Even something like this could get the point across:
[+] [-] tsycho|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Groxx|13 years ago|reply
>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
[+] [-] ruswick|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] learn|13 years ago|reply
Found this: http://us.linkedin.com/company/arcode
Looks like they are going to make their money by improving the email user experience.
[+] [-] burke|13 years ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] jongold|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktsmith|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnriot|13 years ago|reply
how many times have we heard that... you mean you're going to sell ads or my data. Thanks, but no thanks.
[+] [-] Dramatize|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|13 years ago|reply
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.."
[+] [-] trustfundbaby|13 years ago|reply
couple of observations
- The interface is very clean and very intriguing. I find myself going "I wonder how the decided to do that ... didn't think I'd like it, but it seems to work alright"
- I wish you chose a more attractive font to render emails in. My emails looked alright in postbox but they look crappy in Inky :\
- I would ask that you offer the option to set the threshold at which we "Automatically add recipients of sent messages to the address book". email clients over the years have made my contacts completely worthless with this email-once-add-to-contacts-feature because there are tons of people I email once or twice and never speak to again, but at some point (5 emails in perhaps) ... its a good idea to add that person to your contacts.
- memory usage is about 327MB (Real memory column on OSX), we'll see how it does in the next week or so. Postbox is at 815MB, which is one of the reasons I've fallen out of love with it ... that and the Postbox team's seeming mindset that they've gone as far as they can with it.
- Will also to see how big the index size gets, and how it impacts my cpu usage. Postbox uses 10GB of storage for my 3 email accounts and has my cpu fan constantly blowing hard on cpu idle.
Good first impression. Its seems like a decent email client right now, but I Can't wait to see if you can actually do something truly mindblowing/innovative with it
[+] [-] amolsarva|13 years ago|reply
- hosted gmail account - set up easily for me
- sucked in my mail fast too
- prioritized the inbox pretty ok, but will have to try in the AM when I have more BS mail not just late night 'real' mail
- UI is a little slow I guess. You need a ? shortcut to prompt keyboard shortcuts
- I like the approach: just be an alternative UI to the gmail engine. You can coast on their infrastructure. Others are doing this too like Handle, AltoMail, others
TAKE IT FROM ME...
- Peek also got constantly dinged to "hey, support Exchange!" but we never got far with corporate users even when we bent over backwards to support them
- gmail was the vast majority of users
- outlook/hotmail is actually large and super annoying to support. you need a special partnership license with msft and we went and got one. email me if you want help/access. amol at peek dot ly
- yahoo you can use imap back door. also very large
- power users: we were a cheap, simple gadget so power users would criticize us on the one hand but then not use us since they weren't going to abandon their blackberry anyway (or android, later). In this case though, it seems Inky needs to work well for power users. So this performance stuff people are complaining about needs to be better
SUGGESTIONS
- weird that you didn't start with a mobile app
- a bit weird to create a 'desktop client' that is actually just a web app container (that's what it is right?)
- efforts like thunderbird or postbox at least "get your mail on your pc" which has a neat quality to it. Inky doesn't do that. What's the advantage of being a desktop app here?
- the overall betterness of Inky isn't apparent. The UI does resemble the "3.0" looks of a bunch of other mail apps as commenters have mentioned. There are some usability tweaks but also some steps back. I am most excited about the relevance and smart views -- this is the area nobody is doing well yet. The "algo for your email". I guess I need to use it more to see this benefit? </pre>
I'm excited to find my next mail client. I really don't like Gmail and the death of Thunderbird was sad for me. I want you guys to make something awesome!
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davorb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepainfultruth|13 years ago|reply
Dude, just no. Don't be one of those founders. Don't get drunk off your own Koolaid. I'm a heavy daily thunderbird user with 10 accounts and at this point in time, with this release, Thunderbird literally does everything better than Inky. Everything. From account setup, to available options, to information density, plugins, sorting collumn options, UI and collumn flexibility, customization, massive options, and about 35 other things. Email is broken not because it isn't pretty, it's broken because there's too much email, too much spam, and a lack of good threading. Common let's be honest, you made email pretty. You mac-afied it. Took out Spam filter and replaced it with Relevant/Not Relevant.
Your design, name, logo, URL are amazing.
However, Inky couldn't connect to my custom domain inboxes like [email protected] and hangs on the "discover settings" page even after I specify the pop and smtp settings. Gmail works fine though. I'm sure you'll fix that quick so I'm not judging you on it.
Also, Inky has a bad case of the "looks over functionality" flu and "hide everything off the screen and call it minimalization" disease that's been going around. Information density is really low. Every message takes up too much space. With thunderbird my inbox fills up my whole monitor and I could skim through my entire inbox in 15 seconds. With Inky every little message takes up so much visual room it takes forever to check my mail. And everything takes more clicks than usual to complete. And clickable icons like checkboxes etc... are too small.
Not to mention, where is the spam button?
If you sing on your own merrits you'll always find fans, but when you compare yourself to Whitney Houston you're just asking for a backlash. Likewise, had you not compared Inky to Thunderbird you would have been fine.
[+] [-] Benferhat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
I like the discovery/enrollment process.
Not a big fan of the UI itself, or performance after sign up, at least as it is right now. The only element which seems visually distinct to me is the far left menubar; everything else kind of blends together in a too-widely-spaced collection of random boxes, not even lists. I like native OS widgets. This isn't a video game, don't make me figure out some new convention just to scroll a list.
Search is nice (which is the only reason I still use anything on gmail). Inspires me to try to get lucerne working on my own mail again.
Also not really a fan of giving my login credentials to a cloud service for no particular reason. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to keep them within a client only, and just go through the setup each time.
Realistically I'm unlikely to move off mutt (for intensive email use) or gmail (for infrequent use from other machines), but I'll try it again someday.
[+] [-] richo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cschep|13 years ago|reply
Totally stoked to have something new to check out in this space though. :)
[+] [-] thezoid|13 years ago|reply
The design is nice though.
[+] [-] kbuck|13 years ago|reply
I'm still using Thunderbird because I can't find a nice client with true threading (not the 'conversation threading' that seems to be popular recently). This client appears to be no exception.
[+] [-] Rayne|13 years ago|reply
I also can't for the life of me figure out how to add a second email address.
[+] [-] thefreeman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Revisor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcr|13 years ago|reply
I'll bite. I'm a sysadmin who gets gobs of email per day. Maybe I'm not part of your target market ("Simple! Just works!"), but I'll offer my thoughts in hopes that they're useful.
I've tried it for a bit. Here's what I like about Inky as a mail client:
- Vi default keyboard shortcuts :)
- The dialog for adding arbitrary IMAP servers is outstanding. Leagues better than Thunderbird. For those who haven't tried it, you type in your email address, then it looks up the servers in the MX records of the email's hostname. You click an "Allow" button next to the server that you actually intended to send your password to, and it starts using that server. Excellent.
- AUTOMATIC UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON. Dude. Maybe this is common in other mail clients but I just spent like ten minutes unsubscribing myself from useless things. Click, click, click. It's catharsis in a box. This alone made my brief spin with Inky worth my time.
- Nice UI for viewing and editing settings. Surprisingly advanced options for eg. caching, displaying and downloading messages, keyboard shortcuts, and so on hidden in the settings.
- Didn't interfere with my other email clients, as promised.
Security issues that I don't like:
- You didn't even warn me when I added my mail server with a self-signed SSL certificate. Sure, the UI does imply that you're not sending my password to that server before I click the "Allow" button, but there's no way for me to even check the SSL certificate fingerprint before I do that.
- You also didn't let me know whether I'm using an SSL/TLS connection at all.
I expect any decent email client to loudly complain about security issues like these. Inky is a broken email client until it does so.
- Storing my IMAP password on your cloud server is not OK. I know my passwords are encrypted with my Inky password, but that's exactly what I'm sending you whenever I log into my Inky account. Thus, Inky employees can access my email if they watch me authenticate with your servers. I'm not convinced. You've ensured that adding new mail accounts is stupid easy, so why are you "helpfully" keeping a copy of my password for me? At least give me the option of storing passwords in my OS keyring. I'd like to know more about the security of this system and your motivations for doing this.
UI things that I don't like:
- Bug: I add a server, then I click on "Compose message," then I add another server, then click back to my message that I previously started to compose. You don't list the new second server in the "From:" dropdown menu, so I thought I didn't add the new outgoing server properly. I have to scrap that message and start composing a new one before both servers show up in the "From:" dropdown.
- You treat an email thread as a linear list of messages. Email threads have inherent hierarchy and structure. I can't see who's replying to who without expanding the quoted parts.
- You group emails together by subject. I have 1,000 nightly automated server emails per each server accumulated over the past five years. Please don't group them together like that.
- In mailing lists, it's conventional to have "Reply All" as the default action, not just "Reply." I'd love if you detected that.
- Please infer my address book from people in my inbox who sent me things. I don't want to type all that again, and it looks like there's no visible way for me to import contacts. Slurping up contact details when I send messages to people would also help with this.
- In threaded email lists, there's so much whitespace that I can't tell where a message ends and where the next one begins. For example, how many emails are visible on the right side of this screenshot? http://i.imgur.com/92cKQ.png
- There's also way too much whitespace in the message list. I could only see 10 messages in my screenshot, which really hurts when I'm scanning through search results. (EDIT: I accidentally clicked on the date header and it gives you more layout options to condense things down)
- This is currently a free product. How are you making money?
It doesn't work on Linux, so I can't use it day-to-day. That said, I really like what you're doing here, and it's certainly a great start. Until then, I'm headed back to Notmuch ( http://notmuchmail.org/ ) for the time being.
[+] [-] chacham15|13 years ago|reply
> you type in your email address, then it looks up the servers in the MX records of the email's hostname
The MX records store the server receiving mail (i.e. an smtp server). How does this relate to the imap server?
> AUTOMATIC UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON
This sounds interesting, but how would this work? Often times there are forms that the unsubscribe link leads to, how would it be able to correctly populate and send it?
Furthermore, in my experience, these links dont usually work and the better solution is to forward all mail from that source directly to junk mail. Is your experience different?
> Nice UI for viewing and editing settings. Surprisingly advanced options for eg. caching ...
Do you actually use these? Do you really care how long a message is cached for? I feel like most of these confuse the average user (obviously not you) and provide little value for the more advanced users.
> Didn't interfere with my other email clients, as promised
Is this an issue? How does this happen?
> You didn't even warn me when...
What is the average users response to such a warning? Heck, would you know if there were a man in the middle given the warning? I think that this is one of the shortcomings of the PKI: most warnings are false alarms which lead to mistrusting the system.
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply
- See security comments elsewhere. Inky does not send our servers your Inky password.
- Grouping emails by subject: email threading information is pretty broken in practice; many clients don't populate References: properly, and Outlook uses its own thing called Thread-Id. So we have to use heuristics in many cases.
- Email thread structure: you're the only person who's ever asked us for this. GMail's pretty much killed real threading as a design.
[+] [-] samstave|13 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] portman|13 years ago|reply
Fancy suggestion, related: since [email protected] seems to be a convention these days, consider automatically setting the user's full name during auto-discovery if it conforms to that syntax.
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply