spark is a well-regarded email app by readdle, so much so that apple gave it an editors’ choice award in the mac app store.
It’s relatively easy to set up, though there are a few hurdles to jump through when it comes to iCloud. to set this up in spark you will need to generate an application specific password and to do so you will need two factor authentication to be enabled. this is more of an apple security feature than a limitation with spark.
spark’s design is clean and simple. In the sidebar you have all of your inboxes for the various email services you link (gmail, hotmail, icloud, exchange, etc), but there’s also a universal inbox so you can see everything in one place. one of the real benefits of spark is the smart inbox setup. this divides your received mail into different sections, including personal, notifications, newsletters, pins, and viewed. from the start we already felt less stressed because it felt like the stuff that mattered had been stripped away so we could focus on it right away.
open an email and you’ll see a pin option, which is similar to choosing to pin an email in mail, but more in line with the way you might pin a note in notes or a web page in safari. it’s an easy way to separate important emails so you can find them quickly, but don’t pin everything. I wish the mail could do this too!
also has a repeat option, which we think is a great idea. we tend to ‘manage’ our email by opening them, looking at them to see if we need to do anything right away, and then marking them unread with a view to coming back to them later. with spark we can choose to snooze an email until later today, tomorrow, next week, someday, or choose a date.
You’ll see another cool feature if you scroll to the bottom of an email. here you will see buttons for reply, forward and quick reply. quick reply is a bit like how you might reply to text messages or social media posts with a like or love, with the addition of replies like great idea or call me. we like the idea, but these types of responses are probably not appropriate for work email.
There are some useful swipe actions you can use to quickly manage your emails. a short swipe from left to right changes from read to unread. a long swipe from left to right archives an email. a short swipe from the right pins an email. and a long swipe from the right will remove. we were a bit worried that we might accidentally delete something we wanted to fix. you can actually change the swipe actions in the settings which makes it even more useful.
templates is another useful feature. If you often send identical or similarly worded emails, you can store them in templates and retrieve them when needed.
If you frequently check your email late at night and refrain from responding at that time because you don’t want your email to be lost or because you don’t want that person to feel like they have to reply to you at 11pm, then send later is up to you. this allows you to schedule when an email is sent, so you can choose to send it later today, this afternoon, or tomorrow, or choose a date on the calendar.
There’s also the option to set a reminder, so if you don’t get a response in, say, a week, you can get an alert reminding you to move on. this could be really useful.
The app has a built-in calendar that works with icloud and gmail. it is compatible with icloud, google, yahoo, exchange, outlook and imap.
spark is free, but you can pay a monthly fee per user for various team-centric features and additional file storage. The app is brilliant and you should definitely give it a try, plus there is also an iOS app that is just as powerful.