Inky Review - Smart Email Client Driven by Simplicity

good
key review info
  • Application: Inky 2.2.17
  • Reviewed on:
application features
  • Cross-platform email client
  • (7 more, see all...)

Developed for casual users with multiple email accounts, Inky is a free cloud-based mail client wrapped in an attractive and intuitive interface.

This software application is rather simple to configure and it focuses on key aspects about emails, such as smart views, unified inbox, and relevance sorting. It lets you set up email accounts for any provider and synchronizes data across all supported devices, offering support for not only Windows, but also Mac OS and iOS.

Installation and account setup

The installer is fast and uncomplicated. Once Inky is launched, it's necessary to set up an account with a username and password that will be necessary for logging into the client to view all your personal accounts. For security purposes, the tool requests that you create an answer for a secret question and prompts you for it in case you forget the key.

This way, Inky can be accessed by multiple users who happen to share the same computer, or you can log in from any PC to instantly access all email accounts. However, if you're the only user, you can ask the app to automatically log in with the credentials at every program startup.

Clear-cut interface and features

As far as the interface is concerned, the vertical columns along with the dark, white and blue theme remind us of TweetDeck. Smart views keep all messages organized into multiple folders, such as filtered inbox, personal, social, daily deals, subscriptions, notes, blocked, packages, and maps. You can customize the color of each group or disable any unwanted one.

Inky: Explore all messages in a unified folder
Inky: Explore all messages in a unified folder

Meanwhile, the dock lets you browse accounts and smart views, compose new messages, and check out contacts, while the toolbar gives you the possibility to sort messages and apply filters by taking into account various aspects. Smart cards are basically buttons with special functions, like one-click unsubscription, map location, or loaded remote images.

Another important aspect worth noting is that Inky is capable of predicting the relevance of each message, showing the relevant ones with highlighted ink drops. If it gets anything wrong, you can send instant feedback by changing a message's priority with one click.

Add email accounts and explore categories

It's possible to set up as many email accounts as you want. The app automatically detects the server settings of popular providers, enabling you to define new IMAP or POP accounts by just entering the user name and password. If it gets any properties wrong, you can manually edit them. Moreover, you can test the connectivity strength between your PC and the email providers via the ping command. To personalize multiple profiles and tell them apart easier, you can assign different icons and colors.

The viewing mode is, by default, a unified inbox which combines messages from all accounts. You can group emails by name, conversation or sender, sort them by relevance, time, subject, sender or size, list all flagged messages at the top, use a search function for the current folder, specify the time interval that defines the recent section to use, increase or decrease the font, or change the columns viewing mode.

Furthermore, you can toggle flagged or unread messages, copy them to the Clipboard or print them, increase or decrease their relevance, forward them as attachments, save them as HTML, view the source code, or assign the sender to the smart view.

Compose messages and configure program settings

When composing a new email, you can make any of your accounts as the sender address, write your real name or hide it, turn on the spellchecker (multiple languages are supported), set cc and bcc receivers, insert emoticons, special characters, images and links, modify formatting attributes, as well as browse the local disk for attachments or select one from ADrive.

Inky: Customize smart view colors
Inky: Customize smart view colors

Recent logins across all supported devices can be investigated from the settings panel, so you can keep track of your activity and find out if unauthorized users have been accessing your private information. Plus, you can view all email passwords saved in Inky, use keyboard shortcuts, or create an ADrive account for online storage.

For each email account it's possible to tinker with properties regarding the identity (e.g. icon, color, image seen by other Inky users, signature), aliases for specific email services, the client and server (e.g. remove account from unified folders), and special folders (e.g. clear messages).


The Good

The email client's cross-platform, featuring support for Windows, Mac OS and iOS. It's compatible with Windows 8 (32- and 64-bit), 7, Vista and XP.

It lets you set up multiple IMAP and POP email accounts, and gathers mails from all accounts in a unified inbox. They are marked as relevant or irrelevant by the tool, depending on their importance.

Smart views keep all messages organized into multiple folders, such as filtered inbox, personal, social, daily deals, subscriptions, notes, blocked, packages, and maps.

There are numerous customization options available, such as icons and colors for each email account. You can easily sort and filter messages.

The interface is attractive and approachable for casual users, while advanced settings are reserved for those more experienced.

It's necessary to set up an Inky account to get access to personal accounts and view synchronized data from any supported device.

The Bad

Although the developer mentioned in the welcoming tour that it lets you connect to your email providers directly (so it doesn't pass through Inky's servers) and that your passwords are encrypted via the AES algorithm, some users might still feel reluctant to using a cloud-enabled email client.

We've noticed that Inky is quite demanding when it comes to CPU and RAM. Sometimes it takes too long to log in or load a panel (we had to exit the program and restart it on several occasions because it got stuck in the loading panel).

It doesn't offer support for Android or Windows Phone.

Although the settings panel has an option listed for system notifications, Inky doesn't show visual alerts on incoming messages (we tested it on Windows 8.1 and Windows 7).

The Truth

Inky has been around for about 7 years and rightly attracted a lot of users thanks to its eye-catching interface and fairly intuitive options that make it stand out from the crowd. However, it has some glitches concerning stability and overall inconveniences which cannot be simply overlooked. We're looking forward to the future improvement of an otherwise great email client.

user interface 4
features 3
ease of use 4
pricing / value 5


final rating 3
Editor's review
good
 
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Inky (13 Images)

Inky: Create an account to access all personal accountsInky: Configure advanced server settingsInky: Add as many accounts as you wantInky: Explore all messages in a unified folderInky: Compose new messages and customize settings
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