14 ms·

Desktop App for All Your Email

158 points by tortilla 14y ago

rwbt 14y ago
How is this cloud-enabled? It just looks like an email client.
- pyrhho 14y ago
  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.
  - glennos 14y ago
    Not at all a fan of this. I guess it sets them up to do a web service later on, but it's seems a little aggressive and unnecessary.
- Void_ 14y ago
  How is email not cloud-enabled?
  - alexmchale 14y ago
    They don't let me use my iPhone on the airplanes.
jongold 14y ago
You mean a new Mac email client that isn't just a LaunchRock signup page & some tasteful Dribbble shots? Amazing :)
- dsl 14y ago
  Which means it will be acquired and shot in the head by Google soon to avoid losing Gmail eyeballs.
  - jongold 14y ago
    better than vaporware
- ktsmith 14y ago
  Seems like there's something broken on that site. There is a mac download link at the top and a windows download link way at the bottom.
  - harigov 14y ago
    If you open the website on mac, it shows windows download link at the top and mac download link at the bottom.
CWIZO 14y ago
Where's the download link?
samstave 14y ago
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...
- dmbaggett 14y ago
  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.
- gcr 14y ago
  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.
- mike-cardwell 14y ago
  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.
  - lurkinggrue 14y ago
    People still use IMAP?
    - gcr 14y ago
      How do you get your mail? HTTP? Telnet?
goyalpulkit 14y ago
Features are great, but looks a bit blurry in retina display.
alpb 14y ago
This came out of nowhere and looks cool. What happened to http://dotmailapp.com 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.
cschep 14y ago
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. :)
- thezoid 14y ago
  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. The design is nice though.
jrubinovitz 14y ago
Hmm, I have IMAP enabled and this isn't connecting to my Gmail. Any possible fixes?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tsycho 14y ago
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. So again, how are you planning to make money?
- learn 14y ago
  Came here wondering the same thing. I think I will pass on this one. Found this: http://us.linkedin.com/company/arcode http://us.linkedin.com/company/arcode Looks like they are going to make their money by improving the email user experience.
- ruswick 14y ago
  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.
- Groxx 14y ago
  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. [1] http://inky.com/termsofuse.html http://inky.com/termsofuse.html [2] http://inky.com/privacypolicy.html http://inky.com/privacypolicy.html
TobbenTM 14y ago
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?
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  No Exchange support.
  - gcr 14y ago
    My school's exchange server also listens for IMAP connections. It worked fine for me.
Rayne 14y ago
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 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.
- thefreeman 14y ago
  that would be the green plus on the left of your screen shot
muyuu 14y ago
How does it store mail locally? standard Unix mboxes or some proprietary format?
- gcr 14y ago
  It doesn't. This is a pure IMAP client; ignoring the cache, mails are not stored locally on your machine.
  - muyuu 14y ago
    Obviously you don't ignore the cache.
    - jtheory 14y ago
      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.
jwilsco 14y ago
My two cents? I think this takes the "flat" aesthetic too far.
luisivan 14y ago
I was going to try it out but they have no Linux version... sad
whalesalad 14y ago
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.
Void_ 14y ago
I would like to see the source code for this. 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?
- chacham15 14y ago
  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.
rb2k_ 14y ago
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. Looking for where I can delete my account.
- jyrkesh 14y ago
  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...
Groxx 14y ago
>Easy Sorting and Filtering 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?
- martinced 14y ago
  "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 ; )
  - Groxx 14y ago
    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?
    - EwanToo 14y ago
      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.
      - 14y ago
Mistone 14y ago
this looks awesome - going to give it a whirl.
truebecomefalse 14y ago
There is no download link if javascript is disabled on a User's browser.
sergiotapia 14y ago
Constructive criticism: 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 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.."
- gcr 14y ago
  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.
- Rayne 14y ago
  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.
- dmbaggett 14y ago
  Hotmail/Outlook servers have serious issues about usage limits. We're working on fixes (or work-arounds, depending on your perspective).
dmbaggett 14y ago
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, 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.
pdenya 14y ago
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.
- jfb 14y ago
  I use mu [1] (via mu4e) on my Mac, and it's plenty fast and has great search. Admittedly, it doesn't look like Mail.app, but it works great. [1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
- gcr 14y ago
  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/ http://notmuchmail.org/
burke 14y ago
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.
hnriot 14y ago
"we're not worried about making money right now." how many times have we heard that... you mean you're going to sell ads or my data. Thanks, but no thanks.
- Dramatize 14y ago
  Yes. Got to that point and closed the site.
mtgx 14y ago
Is that UI supposed to be "Metro"? Because I don't care much for it.
mike-cardwell 14y ago
Please add PGP and S/MIME support to your TODO list. All the major desktop clients have support for both of these, either natively or via plugins. You could even sync the encrypted keychain between installations.
- af3 14y ago
  +1 for that feature. I think that the niche for good-pgp-support email client is still not completely occupied. Only couple of programs/extensions are doing this job: 1. Enigmail (thunderbird plug-in) 2. Prolly Outlook 3. Mailvelope (chrome extension, AFAIK)
rdl 14y ago
I like the idea of a better mail client, a lot. 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.
pla3rhat3r 14y ago
Why would I switch to Inky from my current email client? I love the idea but I don't see the value. Good luck though!
slashclee 14y ago
No Linux support? Aww.
- mikegioia 14y ago
  I know. Can we not get ONE email client for the desktop that isn't Thunderbird? I'd pay money for this if it was on any Linux distro. Geary is the closest thing to date but I don't think it's production ready.
  - gcr 14y ago
    Do you like commandline mail programs? There are several good ones. Stringing them together is a lot like like clicking together lego blocks: one for downloading mail, another for editing new mail, another for sending mail, another for searching mail, ... Takes a while to set up, but I'm far happier with my offlineimap+notmuch+emacs+msmtp mail stack than I could ever be with Thunderbird.
    - mikegioia 14y ago
      I was never able to stick with the terminal for email. The last time I tried though was with Pine in 2003 (ha) so maybe I'm due for a 2nd chance.
gosukiwi 14y ago
It looks awesome, and only by the screenshot I can tell it's way better than any other alternative for windows. I'll surely give it a try. Nevertheless, it's downloading at 10kb/s...
gregisenberg 14y ago
It's pretty good. Needs to be a bit more sleeker and designed nicer, but looking forward to trying it out.
davorb 14y ago
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.
hudell 14y ago
Tried to use it, but even if I type all IMAP and SMTP information, it did nothing after showing the "Inky is trying to discover your settings" message.
portman 14y ago
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 firstname.lastname@provider.com 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 14y ago
  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.
ethana 14y ago
Can you port this to Metro? Would love to sitback on my couch and reading through all my emails on my Surface.
richo 14y ago
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.
- notatoad 14y ago
  Indeed. Of all the mechanisms i use to communicate, email is by far the least broken. It's not a walled garden, it's not tied to a device, it doesn't cost anything, nobody blocks it, and the concept of somebody not being on the email network is unthinkable. If only everything could be as awesome as email.
gcr 14y ago
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 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/ http://notmuchmail.org/ ) for the time being.
amolsarva 14y ago
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!
- dmbaggett 14y ago
  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?)
amolsarva 14y ago
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. 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 - 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? 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!
jfarmer 14y ago
Blurry as heck on my Retina screen. :( Also freezes after I add my Gmail account, saying "Loading..." I DEMAND A REFUND!!!!!!!!!111 I kid, I kid. I'm going to stick with Sparrow for now, but will revisit this in a few months.
xorgar831 14y ago
Issues I noticed: - when creating inky account, typed in my desired login name, it said it was already taken, then changed to ok on its own. - notes view didn't recognize my notes taken with notepad on an ipad, and tagged with "Notes" in gmail. - wasn't clear how to enable the different views when you're not in the tutorial. - email threads don't include my responses, is that intentional? Some other thoughts: Zimbra had some interesting ideas around deeper inspection of email, like looking up part number in inventory databases if they appeared in the email. They also allowed you to write plugins to parse and do interesting things with the email.
kbuck 14y ago
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.
thepainfultruth 14y ago
"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 support@mywebsitename.com 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 14y ago
  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] [1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/architecture/4-205-analysis-of-contemporary-architecture-fall-2009/readings/MIT4_205F09_Sullivan.pdf http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/architecture/4-205-analysis-of-co...
adinb 14y ago
love playing with this on the desktop...any hope of an iOS client anytime soon?
trustfundbaby 14y ago
I'm liking it. 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
- chacham15 14y ago
  > 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. Settings > General Settings > Address Book > "Mark automatically added contacts important" : "After 5 sent messages" Is that what you wanted?
  - trustfundbaby 14y ago
    Its close but not quite the same. I'd like them not to get into the address book at all until after x sent messages. I guess its just a matter of preference.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
skimmas 14y ago
I just don't see the point of storing my email settings on your servers (even if encripted). I'd rather pay for an application that keeps everything on my device.
Revisor 14y ago
Can you offer a paid version? And could you please revolutionize PGP usability so that my grandmother can use it?
dmbaggett 14y ago
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 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 14y ago
  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...] | +------------------------------------------+
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
justinchen 14y ago
The problem I have with desktop email clients now is the lack of rapportive and boomerang.
lurkinggrue 14y ago
Font rendering is horrible and I don't like lack of contrast. You may have younger eyes than I do. Example of what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/DlsEy.jpg http://i.imgur.com/DlsEy.jpg
dmarble 14y ago
Nicely executed tour and feature set. I like! A couple suggestions: 1. Some Gmail shortcut issues: - 'o' and <enter> should open a message if I'm scrolling the message list. They should expand or collapses a conversation if I'm in message view. - 'y' should not delete. It's a context-sensitive "remove from current view" in Gmail, which in message list mode means archive. In any context, it never means delete. - 'p' and 'n' should go to previous and next conversation when in message view. - Several others: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... 2. There's a slight disconnect between what I can do with keyboard shortcuts and mouse. The one that bothers me most is I can click in the right (message) or left (message list) panels, and the shortcuts will now be focused on that context (e.g. if focused on left, j/k scrolls the message list, but if focused on the right, j/k scrolls the message). However, there doesn't appear to be a way to switch focus between left and right using the keyboard; instead, it appears you must switch to full window message view to get the message view keyboard shortcuts to work, and switch back to side-by-side view to get the message list shortcuts to work. Two ways to solve this: - Have a setting for whether opening messages goes full window or stays side-by-side. This way, when I press <enter> or <right>/<left> (or 'o' with Gmail shortcuts), the message list will stay to the left but the focus will switch to the right. This is what appears to happen when I click my mouse in the message area while still in side-by-side view. - Or, have a new keyboard shortcut to switch focus between message list and message focus. This way users can also process email in the side-by-side view (scroll message list, open message but stay in side-by-side mode, scroll message itself, jump back to message list, etc.). They can also continue to use the current method of opening messages to a full window. 3. Might be tough to make cross-platform, but have a setting to register a global hot-key to bring Inky to the foreground (and minimize if active). This is one feature that makes it soooo easy to make a desktop program that I need to go in-and-out of often a regular go-to product (notes program, music player, desktop switching, etc).
- dmbaggett 14y ago
  Thanks; these are great suggestions. You can see all the keyboard shortcuts with F1. (We'll make ? work for this as well.) The key bindings are all configurable (by us, for now, maybe by everyone eventually -- if anyone wants that). We'll work on improving them.
emperorcezar 14y ago
Mac client _really_ needs full screen support before I'll use it.
WCityMike 14y ago
It's urgently worth knowing that "for security reasons", the folks at Inky will refuse to "delete or deactivate your Inky account," even at your request. I find that completely and utterly unacceptable.
- dmbaggett 14y ago
  Hi Mike, I replied via email to you as well, but it's worth stating the same publicly for the record, and so others know. There are really two cases we need to handle here when a user wants to delete his/her account: 1) the user knows his/her Inky user id and password 2) the user doesn't know one or the other of these In the first case, we can give users the ability to permanently delete their accounts by adding a control in the settings panel. We haven't done this yet, simply because it's dangerous, and we want to make sure we get it right (both in implementation and design) so users don't accidentally delete their accounts — or worse, introduce bugs where Inky corrupts our database and deletes or damages some else's account. We'll put this capability in at some point; we just haven't done it yet. (We were not really intending to launch yet; that sort of happened without our expecting it, because we got a bunch of press that we weren't looking for yet — which is good in some ways, but bad for things like this where we frankly aren't quite ready.) The second case is trickier. If the user doesn't know his/her Inky user id or password, we have the security issue of needing to verify the person's identity when they ask us to delete the account. Ultimately we'd like to use two-factor authentication for this, but that costs money (for the associated text messages to/from the user's phone) and involves some implementation work as well. In either case, we could try to manually modify our database and remove the user's account. But we don't have a process around this yet, and my worry is that it could potentially damage the database when someone makes a mistake. What we're telling users now is that if you remove all your email accounts, you leave a shell Inky account that has no sensitive information left in. Our hope is that this is sufficient until we figure out the right long term solutions here. (Note, too, that we can't reset your account password if you forget it, because it's encrypted with your Inky login password, which, by design, we can't get access to.) We know this isn't ideal, and we're going to work on fixing it. But we're really not trying to be nefarious here. In fact, unlike virtually all other companies offering consumer internet communications tools, we've made privacy and security one of our three primary principles — it's part of the "safe" in our "smart, simple, safe" motto. EDIT: we'll make this a FAQ on our site as well.

158 points by tortilla 14y ago

rwbt 14y ago

How is this cloud-enabled? It just looks like an email client.

pyrhho 14y ago
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.
- glennos 14y ago
  Not at all a fan of this. I guess it sets them up to do a web service later on, but it's seems a little aggressive and unnecessary.
Void_ 14y ago
How is email not cloud-enabled?
- alexmchale 14y ago
  They don't let me use my iPhone on the airplanes.

jongold 14y ago

You mean a new Mac email client that isn't just a LaunchRock signup page & some tasteful Dribbble shots? Amazing :)

dsl 14y ago
Which means it will be acquired and shot in the head by Google soon to avoid losing Gmail eyeballs.
- jongold 14y ago
  better than vaporware
ktsmith 14y ago
Seems like there's something broken on that site. There is a mac download link at the top and a windows download link way at the bottom.
- harigov 14y ago
  If you open the website on mac, it shows windows download link at the top and mac download link at the bottom.

CWIZO 14y ago

Where's the download link?

samstave 14y ago

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...

dmbaggett 14y ago
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.
gcr 14y ago
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.
mike-cardwell 14y ago
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.
- lurkinggrue 14y ago
  People still use IMAP?
  - gcr 14y ago
    How do you get your mail? HTTP? Telnet?

goyalpulkit 14y ago

Features are great, but looks a bit blurry in retina display.

alpb 14y ago

This came out of nowhere and looks cool. What happened to http://dotmailapp.com 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.

cschep 14y ago

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. :)

thezoid 14y ago
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. The design is nice though.

jrubinovitz 14y ago

Hmm, I have IMAP enabled and this isn't connecting to my Gmail. Any possible fixes?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tsycho 14y ago

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. So again, how are you planning to make money?

learn 14y ago
Came here wondering the same thing. I think I will pass on this one. Found this: http://us.linkedin.com/company/arcode http://us.linkedin.com/company/arcode Looks like they are going to make their money by improving the email user experience.
ruswick 14y ago
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.
Groxx 14y ago
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. [1] http://inky.com/termsofuse.html http://inky.com/termsofuse.html [2] http://inky.com/privacypolicy.html http://inky.com/privacypolicy.html

TobbenTM 14y ago

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?

FireBeyond 14y ago
No Exchange support.
- gcr 14y ago
  My school's exchange server also listens for IMAP connections. It worked fine for me.

Rayne 14y ago

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 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.

thefreeman 14y ago
that would be the green plus on the left of your screen shot

muyuu 14y ago

How does it store mail locally? standard Unix mboxes or some proprietary format?

gcr 14y ago
It doesn't. This is a pure IMAP client; ignoring the cache, mails are not stored locally on your machine.
- muyuu 14y ago
  Obviously you don't ignore the cache.
  - jtheory 14y ago
    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.

jwilsco 14y ago

My two cents? I think this takes the "flat" aesthetic too far.

luisivan 14y ago

I was going to try it out but they have no Linux version... sad

whalesalad 14y ago

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.

Void_ 14y ago

I would like to see the source code for this. 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?

chacham15 14y ago
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.

rb2k_ 14y ago

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. Looking for where I can delete my account.

jyrkesh 14y ago
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...

Groxx 14y ago

>Easy Sorting and Filtering 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?

martinced 14y ago
"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 ; )
- Groxx 14y ago
  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?
  - EwanToo 14y ago
    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.
    - 14y ago

Mistone 14y ago

this looks awesome - going to give it a whirl.

truebecomefalse 14y ago

There is no download link if javascript is disabled on a User's browser.

sergiotapia 14y ago

Constructive criticism: 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 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.."

gcr 14y ago
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.
Rayne 14y ago
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.
dmbaggett 14y ago
Hotmail/Outlook servers have serious issues about usage limits. We're working on fixes (or work-arounds, depending on your perspective).

dmbaggett 14y ago

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, 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.

pdenya 14y ago

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.

jfb 14y ago
I use mu [1] (via mu4e) on my Mac, and it's plenty fast and has great search. Admittedly, it doesn't look like Mail.app, but it works great. [1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
gcr 14y ago
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/ http://notmuchmail.org/

burke 14y ago

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.

hnriot 14y ago

"we're not worried about making money right now." how many times have we heard that... you mean you're going to sell ads or my data. Thanks, but no thanks.

Dramatize 14y ago
Yes. Got to that point and closed the site.

mtgx 14y ago

Is that UI supposed to be "Metro"? Because I don't care much for it.

mike-cardwell 14y ago

Please add PGP and S/MIME support to your TODO list. All the major desktop clients have support for both of these, either natively or via plugins. You could even sync the encrypted keychain between installations.

af3 14y ago
+1 for that feature. I think that the niche for good-pgp-support email client is still not completely occupied. Only couple of programs/extensions are doing this job: 1. Enigmail (thunderbird plug-in) 2. Prolly Outlook 3. Mailvelope (chrome extension, AFAIK)

rdl 14y ago

I like the idea of a better mail client, a lot. 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.

pla3rhat3r 14y ago

Why would I switch to Inky from my current email client? I love the idea but I don't see the value. Good luck though!

slashclee 14y ago

No Linux support? Aww.

mikegioia 14y ago
I know. Can we not get ONE email client for the desktop that isn't Thunderbird? I'd pay money for this if it was on any Linux distro. Geary is the closest thing to date but I don't think it's production ready.
- gcr 14y ago
  Do you like commandline mail programs? There are several good ones. Stringing them together is a lot like like clicking together lego blocks: one for downloading mail, another for editing new mail, another for sending mail, another for searching mail, ... Takes a while to set up, but I'm far happier with my offlineimap+notmuch+emacs+msmtp mail stack than I could ever be with Thunderbird.
  - mikegioia 14y ago
    I was never able to stick with the terminal for email. The last time I tried though was with Pine in 2003 (ha) so maybe I'm due for a 2nd chance.

gosukiwi 14y ago

It looks awesome, and only by the screenshot I can tell it's way better than any other alternative for windows. I'll surely give it a try. Nevertheless, it's downloading at 10kb/s...

gregisenberg 14y ago

It's pretty good. Needs to be a bit more sleeker and designed nicer, but looking forward to trying it out.

davorb 14y ago

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.

hudell 14y ago

Tried to use it, but even if I type all IMAP and SMTP information, it did nothing after showing the "Inky is trying to discover your settings" message.

portman 14y ago

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 firstname.lastname@provider.com 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 14y ago
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.

ethana 14y ago

Can you port this to Metro? Would love to sitback on my couch and reading through all my emails on my Surface.

richo 14y ago

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.

notatoad 14y ago
Indeed. Of all the mechanisms i use to communicate, email is by far the least broken. It's not a walled garden, it's not tied to a device, it doesn't cost anything, nobody blocks it, and the concept of somebody not being on the email network is unthinkable. If only everything could be as awesome as email.

gcr 14y ago

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 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/ http://notmuchmail.org/ ) for the time being.

amolsarva 14y ago

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!

dmbaggett 14y ago
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?)

amolsarva 14y ago

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. 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 - 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? 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!

jfarmer 14y ago

Blurry as heck on my Retina screen. :( Also freezes after I add my Gmail account, saying "Loading..." I DEMAND A REFUND!!!!!!!!!111 I kid, I kid. I'm going to stick with Sparrow for now, but will revisit this in a few months.

xorgar831 14y ago

Issues I noticed: - when creating inky account, typed in my desired login name, it said it was already taken, then changed to ok on its own. - notes view didn't recognize my notes taken with notepad on an ipad, and tagged with "Notes" in gmail. - wasn't clear how to enable the different views when you're not in the tutorial. - email threads don't include my responses, is that intentional? Some other thoughts: Zimbra had some interesting ideas around deeper inspection of email, like looking up part number in inventory databases if they appeared in the email. They also allowed you to write plugins to parse and do interesting things with the email.

kbuck 14y ago

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.

thepainfultruth 14y ago

"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 support@mywebsitename.com 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 14y ago
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] [1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/architecture/4-205-analysis-of-contemporary-architecture-fall-2009/readings/MIT4_205F09_Sullivan.pdf http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/architecture/4-205-analysis-of-co...

adinb 14y ago

love playing with this on the desktop...any hope of an iOS client anytime soon?

trustfundbaby 14y ago

I'm liking it. 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

chacham15 14y ago
> 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. Settings > General Settings > Address Book > "Mark automatically added contacts important" : "After 5 sent messages" Is that what you wanted?
- trustfundbaby 14y ago
  Its close but not quite the same. I'd like them not to get into the address book at all until after x sent messages. I guess its just a matter of preference.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

skimmas 14y ago

I just don't see the point of storing my email settings on your servers (even if encripted). I'd rather pay for an application that keeps everything on my device.

Revisor 14y ago

Can you offer a paid version? And could you please revolutionize PGP usability so that my grandmother can use it?

dmbaggett 14y ago

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 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 14y ago
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...] | +------------------------------------------+

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

justinchen 14y ago

The problem I have with desktop email clients now is the lack of rapportive and boomerang.

lurkinggrue 14y ago

Font rendering is horrible and I don't like lack of contrast. You may have younger eyes than I do. Example of what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/DlsEy.jpg http://i.imgur.com/DlsEy.jpg

dmarble 14y ago

Nicely executed tour and feature set. I like! A couple suggestions: 1. Some Gmail shortcut issues: - 'o' and <enter> should open a message if I'm scrolling the message list. They should expand or collapses a conversation if I'm in message view. - 'y' should not delete. It's a context-sensitive "remove from current view" in Gmail, which in message list mode means archive. In any context, it never means delete. - 'p' and 'n' should go to previous and next conversation when in message view. - Several others: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe... 2. There's a slight disconnect between what I can do with keyboard shortcuts and mouse. The one that bothers me most is I can click in the right (message) or left (message list) panels, and the shortcuts will now be focused on that context (e.g. if focused on left, j/k scrolls the message list, but if focused on the right, j/k scrolls the message). However, there doesn't appear to be a way to switch focus between left and right using the keyboard; instead, it appears you must switch to full window message view to get the message view keyboard shortcuts to work, and switch back to side-by-side view to get the message list shortcuts to work. Two ways to solve this: - Have a setting for whether opening messages goes full window or stays side-by-side. This way, when I press <enter> or <right>/<left> (or 'o' with Gmail shortcuts), the message list will stay to the left but the focus will switch to the right. This is what appears to happen when I click my mouse in the message area while still in side-by-side view. - Or, have a new keyboard shortcut to switch focus between message list and message focus. This way users can also process email in the side-by-side view (scroll message list, open message but stay in side-by-side mode, scroll message itself, jump back to message list, etc.). They can also continue to use the current method of opening messages to a full window. 3. Might be tough to make cross-platform, but have a setting to register a global hot-key to bring Inky to the foreground (and minimize if active). This is one feature that makes it soooo easy to make a desktop program that I need to go in-and-out of often a regular go-to product (notes program, music player, desktop switching, etc).

dmbaggett 14y ago
Thanks; these are great suggestions. You can see all the keyboard shortcuts with F1. (We'll make ? work for this as well.) The key bindings are all configurable (by us, for now, maybe by everyone eventually -- if anyone wants that). We'll work on improving them.

emperorcezar 14y ago

Mac client _really_ needs full screen support before I'll use it.

WCityMike 14y ago

It's urgently worth knowing that "for security reasons", the folks at Inky will refuse to "delete or deactivate your Inky account," even at your request. I find that completely and utterly unacceptable.

dmbaggett 14y ago
Hi Mike, I replied via email to you as well, but it's worth stating the same publicly for the record, and so others know. There are really two cases we need to handle here when a user wants to delete his/her account: 1) the user knows his/her Inky user id and password 2) the user doesn't know one or the other of these In the first case, we can give users the ability to permanently delete their accounts by adding a control in the settings panel. We haven't done this yet, simply because it's dangerous, and we want to make sure we get it right (both in implementation and design) so users don't accidentally delete their accounts — or worse, introduce bugs where Inky corrupts our database and deletes or damages some else's account. We'll put this capability in at some point; we just haven't done it yet. (We were not really intending to launch yet; that sort of happened without our expecting it, because we got a bunch of press that we weren't looking for yet — which is good in some ways, but bad for things like this where we frankly aren't quite ready.) The second case is trickier. If the user doesn't know his/her Inky user id or password, we have the security issue of needing to verify the person's identity when they ask us to delete the account. Ultimately we'd like to use two-factor authentication for this, but that costs money (for the associated text messages to/from the user's phone) and involves some implementation work as well. In either case, we could try to manually modify our database and remove the user's account. But we don't have a process around this yet, and my worry is that it could potentially damage the database when someone makes a mistake. What we're telling users now is that if you remove all your email accounts, you leave a shell Inky account that has no sensitive information left in. Our hope is that this is sufficient until we figure out the right long term solutions here. (Note, too, that we can't reset your account password if you forget it, because it's encrypted with your Inky login password, which, by design, we can't get access to.) We know this isn't ideal, and we're going to work on fixing it. But we're really not trying to be nefarious here. In fact, unlike virtually all other companies offering consumer internet communications tools, we've made privacy and security one of our three primary principles — it's part of the "safe" in our "smart, simple, safe" motto. EDIT: we'll make this a FAQ on our site as well.