Inky is a spritely email client app that gives you the ability to see exactly the kinds of messages you want to see across a number of email accounts. The Inky Mac app (free) unifies your Yahoo, Gmail, and other email accounts into one desktop app. Inky is also available for Windows and iOS, but not yet for Android or Windows Phone. It's colorful, has a spacious interface, and is fairly easy to use. If you're looking for a free email client app on Mac that will let you sift your email a little faster, Inky is worth downloading. It does not, however, integrate tightly with other online services and apps that you might actually want to see in your email client, such as calendars and task managers.
Design
The Inky app has a classic three-pane view; the panes are resizable. On the far left is a thin strip of icons that takes up very little space. The middle row contains the preview of each message and its metadata, such as the sender name, subject line, and date. The third piece of the window is the largest by default, and it's where you see your messages in full and compose new mail.
Inky looks more fun than businesslike. The design feels modern, with a fairly flat look and non-skeuomorphic icons. The icons in the left rail let you compose new messages and select various views of your email accounts. There are also icons for seeing certain types of messages, such as daily deal emails, social network notifications, and messages relating to subscriptions.
While some of these views may sound similar to those you've seen in other email clients, notably Inbox for Gmail, Inky does have a few unique ones: package tracking, maps, notes, and the filtered inbox, which I'll explain in a moment.
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Supported Email Accounts
I set up a test account with Inky using one Gmail address and one Yahoo! Mail address. It also supports email addresses from Comcast, Google apps, Office365, Outlook, Virgin Media, and IMAP and POP accounts.
Set up is relatively simple. You just connect your accounts, and Inky takes care of the rest, importing some of your email into the new view. Just viewing mail in Inky will not significantly change anything in your existing email accounts, although any actions you take in Inky will sync back to your accounts.
Features and Use
The first special view in Inky is the Filtered Inbox, which shows only personal messages across all of your email addresses, but not newsletters, daily deals, or social notifications.
Another view is called Notes, and it's a novel feature I haven't seen in other email clients. Notes are emails that you sent to yourself to remember something. Rather than using a note-syncing app, such as Evernote, you can just email yourself reminders, and Inky will automatically sort them into a separate view for you. It's a great feature for disorganized types, although there are advantages to using a dedicated note-taking app, such as the ability to record audio memos, image OCR, and more.
If you want to see everything, you can click on the unified inbox icon. In this view, you see the most recent messages across all the email accounts you have connected to Inky.
The icons Inky uses aren't intuitive. They don't look like the things that they represent. It takes a while to learn what the abstract images mean, but if you hover over them a description will eventually appear.
Similar to the Inbox for Gmail app (which should have a Web app version soon), Inky also sorts all your daily deals, newsletters, and social notifications into their own views. The idea, of course, is to help you get a grasp of your inbox without asking you to fully customize it with complex filtering and sorting rules. If you've already done that sort of customization with your inbox, you may find Inky doesn't give you anything new. In that sense, it's best for more lightweight email users rather than power users.
But I do like that Inky can consolidate your email from a number of accounts. That could be useful to many people for many reasons, lightweights or not. As a feature, though, unified inbox isn't new. You can get a similar experience with plenty of other email clients, and from some social media aggregators, too.
There isn't much more to explore if you're an email power user. I'm still on the hunt for an email client that more intelligently incorporates calendaring, tasks, and other productivity components into one place without becoming a behemoth application like Outlook.
Price and Security
All Inky apps are free at the moment. I asked company officials how they plan to stay afloat, and they replied that the company is self-funded and doing just fine at the moment, but eventually there will be three tiers of Inky: a free version for consumers, a prosumer version with additional features, and an enterprise-level option with support commitments and enterprise features (Exchange support, for instance).
One big question many users have about email and email clients is whether and how the companies that make them have access to the contents of your mail. According to Inky, the app, by design, imports and organizes your mail, but the creators of Inky cannot see it. "When you read an email with Inky, you're reading a copy that's stored in the memory of the machine you're reading it on." In other words, you are not reading a copy of mail that's stored in Inky's servers somewhere in the cloud. The company also says that its employees cannot access the contents of your email either.
Inky for Personal Email
I'd recommend Inky to very certain kinds of people: those who have several email accounts but wish they didn't and feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive. It's also ideal if the kind of email that's overwhelming is made up of subscriptions, reminders, and notifications, rather than messages from friends. If the majority of your emails are from your friends, and you're still overwhelmed, Inky probably won't help. Inky's capable at sorting the wheat from the chaff, but not good wheat from bad wheat, if you get my drift.
It's hard not to recommend free apps these days, unless they're truly terrible. Inky is easy to install, easy to use, and probably best suited for personal use rather than business. It runs smoothly on a Mac, and includes on-screen notifications for new mail. For email power users, and those who already have a system for managing mail, Inky probably won't be of much benefit.
If you're not looking for a new client at all but still need help with email, try Editors' Choice service SaneBox, which helps clean up your existing email account with some very sophisticated yet automated filtering and sorting.
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