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.
Since my other comment got downvoted for unknown reasons I'll attach the WARNING here again:
Be aware that Inky uploads your imap password to their servers (see their FAQ). This is probably due to incompetence rather than malice but if you care about your e-mail password you should refrain from installing this software. If you have already entered your imap password into Inky you should change it ASAP.
That's meaningless. It opens a whole range of attack vectors for absolutely reason. No least your inky password (which they presumably use as the key). They allow a minimum length of 6 chars on that, which can be brute forced within hours on todays hardware.
They very clearly have no idea what they're doing (security-wise), consequently this is very likely not the only fatal flaw in their implementation.
Easy account sync between devices is a good enough reason for me. It can be implemented securely, so in general I don't see a problem. Hey, Google Chrome syncs saved passwords, online password vaults like LastPass do this too, are they security-incompetent too?
Don't know what hash function and encryption they use, but I think it's possible to pick/configure them so that brute-forcing even 6-character passwords is impractical.
If you're willing to gamble your imap password on their undocumented process then that's fine.
I posted my warning because I think most users are not even aware that they're sending their password to inky and the implied risk. Also inky does nothing to educate them (a handwavy marketing-blurb buried in the FAQ does not count).
Sorry but comparing inky to LastPass and Google is laughable. Google is trusted because it's Google. LastPass is trusted because their process is extensively documented. If you plan to casually juggle your users crown jewels for a convenience-feature then you'd better fit into one of these two categories.
Client side encryption is only useful when the application is open source. Otherwise, we've no idea if there is a back door in the application and a signal that their servers can send back to the client to inform it to send over all of your login details.
Hushmail were forced by their government to backdoor their system for this purpose. What's stopping the same thing from happening to Inky?
This would be nice to know, because they're serving as a password-management app for all of your email passwords.
Presumably, they would not store your Inky password as well -- instead, they'd store a secure hash, not MD5 or SHA-1, which are built for speed, not security....
It's more complicated than that. Please see my comments on security elsewhere in the thread. We store a password verifier object -- that's akin to a secure hash, but our authentication model offers better guarantees about protection from man-in-the-middle attacks.
Q: How are you planning to make money? A: That's really putting the cart before the horse. We're focused on solving the fundamental problem, which is that email clients are dumb and complicated, when they should be getting smarter and simpler. There are many ways to make money in the email space; we're not worried about making money right now.
Can you expand on this? I agree with your premise that email clients should be getting smarter and simpler (or at least I accept that as a valid premise). Really, though, how do you plan to make money? How do we know this won't disappear/be no longer supported in six months or a year when you get tired of not having any revenue?
My previous company (ITA Software) made enough revenue to (rather comfortably) justify the ~$700M valuation Google paid for it. ITA never took in a single cent of advertising money or money derived from selling users' data to third parties.
I believe a vastly better email platform has inherent value, just like a vastly better travel planning system has inherent value. Look at the dozens of ways companies are currently earning their keep in the email sector. It's not the same as Twitter or Facebook, which only have usability value to consumers, and which can only succeed at massive scale.
This, precisely. What's in it for you? If you plan on keeping your product free for your users, then you are obviously planning on monetizing your users in a different way. I'm very curious to find out how exactly.
It would seem like it since it has libcef which contains the definition for 'cef_browser_create'. Furthermore, it seems that they have added other Javascript libraries into it like CKEditor (http://ckeditor.com/)
Wait. You co-wrote two of the best games ever and now you built a mail client? Ah well, choices in life :) I'll try Inky just because of your credentials. Although it's probably futile; basically the only email client able to handle my 29 gb, ~20 year old inbox is Gmail, the rest (cloud or desktop) just loads forever after importing.
Many people ferociously criticized Crash Bandicoot when it launched in 1996 as well; people just don't remember that.
Please let us know how Inky works for your huge inbox. Like you, some of us (including me) have enormous inboxes, and we've worked hard to make Inky's indexing use very little resources on your box.
I didn't know it in '96; I got to know it much later when I picked up a PS1 on queensday in the Netherlands; it included Crash 1 & 3 and I've been a huge fan ever since (I own all Crashs on all platforms). I play it on my openpandora a lot. For me (and a lot of people I know) the gameplay is better than most stuff out there now.
I'll definitely try Inky :) I'll let you know how it goes.
Inky connected to imap.gmail.com using IMAP, but authentication could not complete.
port 993 using TLS: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
If you have another email account, please add it to Inky, try to discover your GMail account again, and "Report a Problem" using the menu in the lower left corner. Obviously GMail should discover properly; this is a bug.
I really don't want to see ads, but that's preferable over selling my data for a free option. I'd still recommend you give people an ad-free trial (and please make the trial only count days you actually open the app, like Beyond Compare). I'm a free software guy at heart, so the more generous you are with your trial, the more willing I feel to turn a blind eye to opening my wallet for software. Suggestions for how I'd be willing to pay:
1) $20-40/yr for a web service. Most of the world is Windows, so if I'm on the go without my OS X laptop, my phone has died, and I want to check my email I'd have to remember my other email passwords to login to their own services after I got in the habit of using Inky... that wouldn't be good. I'd still want data security, so I'd expect any data that hits your servers to be strongly encrypted in a manner similar to SpiderOak's approach (though I'd prefer Scrypt over PBKDF2). If you open-sourced your client and just sold the service I'd pay more.
2) $50 for the app itself. Less if you want me to pay every year for upgrades.
Thanks -- this is helpful feedback. We agree that Inky will be be most useful when it's available on "all screens," and we're working towards that goal. The architecture is designed with that specific goal in mind.
Great. I gave this some more thought and what I'd actually like, along with a great universal experience, is an email provider that I can really trust. Or rather, an email provider that I don't have to trust. By that I mean that it'd be great if I could get all of my email through Inky and that I'd have the option of having you keep a strongly encrypted copy of those emails while deleting the emails you collect from external providers' servers.
I could have my email everywhere with less worry over wanton snooping over my email archives this way. That would be a very valuable service.
It might require some compromise on data security if I wanted to be able to perform search on my archive via the web service though. Perhaps for people who are willing to give up zero-knowledge you could upsell a service which allows the data to be decrypted server-side in an in-memory store while they're logged in only. I'd be happy without search when using a browser client though.
I can only say that, as a matter of company culture, we are committed to being trustworthy. That's the part of the rationale for "safe" in our "smart, simple, safe" motto. We hope to earn your trust over the coming months.
It's laggy at the first run. and I don't under stand why I must sign up then log in to add my mail accounts?
Like BIS (my good old Blackberry ), I am in China, and be told the BIS service of China Mobile, they will store your email in the database, in plain text. I can't be sure if this is true, though I did not doubt too much. So, as a desktop app, if means "sign up" then will store my email contents on your server? and how about my emails' passwords?
I love the UI but the icons are ugly, I believe you will change them before long.
when I first time to input my gmail address it poped up some dialog warned me that my gmail account was not recognized(?), and suggested me to enable my gmail's IMAP option, of course it's already enabled for years. so I ignored that and entered my password and connected, it also lag a little while, then things went well.
Q: Any chance of providing a link to the Windows build from the not-supported message? I'd at least like to try running it under wine (unsupported and all), and I note that your Windows download div has a small link that lets you download the OS X dmg.
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.