iPhone & iPad
A smart, sophisticated email client. FREE | SPARKMAILAPP.COM
There’s no shortage of email clients vying for space on your iPhone or iPad’s home screen, so why should you be bothered about another? Well, for one thing Spark is more than just an email client. Sure, it allows you to send and receive email from any account, and to file it, flag it, or even ignore it if that’s what you want to do. But Spark also merges features from collaborative tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Its premise is that email is still at the centre of most of our working lives, so why not build a tool around that, rather than use something different?
The result is an email client, available on the Mac as well as iOS, that allows you to share drafts with colleagues and chat to them right inside the app. Alternatively, you can work together to write drafts. Email messages can be shared as web addresses and viewed by anyone with the link.
Also new in Spark is integration with a host of third-party apps and services, including Reminders, Things, Evernote, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud Drive and Dropbox. That integration makes it very straightforward to turn email messages into notes or to-do list items.
Spark doesn’t skip on the features you’d expect from a modern email client, either. Messages are siloed by default into what Spark calls ‘ buckets’, promoting the most important messages and keeping newsletters out of the way in their own bucket, for example. By default, pinned messages are displayed at the top of the screen, with the most recent three pinned messages shown. However, if you’re like us and are somewhat haphazard in the way you use pinned messages, you can very easily change this behaviour so that they’re not given prominence.
Messages can be snoozed so that they pop up again later, and the quick reply feature allows you to respond with an emoji. Built-in widgets let you see a list of emails you recently opened, reminders, and a calendar – if you use a Gmail account, for example, it pulls in your Google calendar.
Spark is very customisable, something that’s important in a tool that wants to be at the centre of your working life. You can change the options for the length of time messages snooze, change what swiping gestures do, and change how widgets are displayed.
It’s also very smart – the first time we composed a draft, it displayed email signatures we’d used previously in other clients and asked which one we wanted to apply. We also liked the option to add a reminder to a draft that didn’t receive a reply within a set period.
Search – a crucial email feature for most of us – is pretty good, too. It fooled us at first, however, only suggesting names and email addresses in results. It was only when we pressed Return on the keyboard that it delivered results with the search term in the subject line or body.