Off late, desktop email is a forbidden territory especially in the consumer space. Pretty much everything barring Outlook and Thunderbird is shunned in this fading arena. Robust webmail services like Gmail and Outlook.com along with ever improving functionality of mobile email apps pretty much sum up the reason why desktop email apps are vanquishing. Does Inky have a chance?. Well, I am glad to say yes.
Say Hi to Inky — A Gorgeous Email App for Windows
Inky is an email app for Windows and Mac which boasts of a hell lot of features. One could go in length raving about them easily. Let me showcase the most critical ones for you.
- Fresh and Extremely Intuitive UI, feels fast.
- Lets you sort email by “Relevance” more on this below
- Smart Views lets you quickly scrape through specific set of emails
- Email Syncing which actually works
- Multi Account support without breaking a sweat
- Terrific level of customisation.
- Various preset Keyboard shortcuts , you can even mimic Gmail shortcut settings
- Easy Sorting and Filtering
- Some really “kool” settings under the hood
- And yes it is free.
Download: Inky [24 MB]
Why is Inky Different?
Inky takes very clean and simple approach for viewing emails which makes it extremely pleasant to check emails from the desktop (cough cough Microsoft Outlook). The UI is really appeasing and the entire app feels pretty snappy, which is a rarity these days for a desktop email client.
If you are not satisfied with the default Outlook.com-inspired look , you can quickly change the look of Inky to resemble more of a single view or a vertical pane setup.
Mind you, while it looks pretty basic and simple on the surface, Inky is actually extremely feature packed at the same time.
Multi Account support, Instant Emails for Real
My TechSplurge email address is what I test when email apps claim support for large-number-of-protocols! as organisation email addresses are trickier to support. No wonder lot of applications fail to even detect the server settings and sadly, Inky was flummoxed at first as well.
But what impressed me from there on is that Inky offered me to choose either to manually set up the configuration of the server (which I would be a blasphemy) or to “guess” the settings. I chose the latter and boy, I was pretty surprised it detected everything without a hitch. All it took was mere two clicks on my part. Downright Impressed
You can navigate Inky through either its own stock shortcuts or you can make it mimic GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail/Outlook or Thunder Bird Shortcuts. This can be found in the settings.
Let me rave about another kick butt feature. This is one of the rare desktop email apps that actually pushes email instantly to your desktop. I always had to manually sync email during my affair with Microsoft Outlook or Evolution on Linux. This is downright welcome too.
Relevance Sorting
Relevance sorting is something which I can safely credit Arcode for being truly innovative. Inky can automatically sort your email according to the relevance. Sure it is tacky at first, but what is interesting here is , you can modify the relevance of a mail on a scale of 10. This way Inky learns of important emails to you.
You can either directly mark an email as relevant or not relevant, or increase the relevance of a mail individually
Smart Views
Of course inky allows you to view email by folders. Inky goes a step further and adds what it calls as smart views, where Inky automatically groups email according to types like Social, Daily Deals, Maps etc. Now this feature is currently in somewhat of a preview stage but you can see that it is heavily inspired from the views in Outlook.com. Whatever may be the case, it works really well, especially so with Social emails. It just saves you a quite decent amount of time spent in going through the usual smattering of email.
You can also unsubscribe from unwanted emails much more easily in Inky with just a click in Inky.
Well Thought Out Settings
Lastly, this is something which I must share. Inky has one of the most exquisite and no-nonsensical settings I have ever seen in an email app ever. Just to give you an idea, options to download attachments automatically only when downloading takes less than 10 seconds, makes you awestruck at the amount of thought the developers have given to these subtle yet crucial details. Kudos.
Wrap-Up
Yes, there are a lot of very minor issues that can be addressed in Inky. Relevance Sorting can be hit or miss at times, and there seems to be no way to auto login into Inky. Also rarely the subject seems to blank out. The app is just in its first iterations and will definitely get better with times. All these issues however are seldom encountered. Make no mistake, Inky trumps the likeability of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and GNOME Evolution very handily due to overall intuitiveness, and some extremely cool features. A no brainer download by all means.
Download: Inky [24 MB]
