Organise your email

Discover how to reignite your enthusiasm for email with Spark

If email makes you anxious, Spark could be the solution. It’s available for iOS too

n If, like us, you spend a lot of time reading and replying to email, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by an overstuffed

inbox. Apple’s Mail app does a decent job of filtering things, but it lacks some useful features that make email much easier, such as automatic replies, automatic classification of incoming messages and the ability to snooze messages until it’s time to deal with them. Spark (Free) offers all those things not just on the Mac, but on iOS and the Apple Watch too.

Spark starts with what it calls the Smart Inbox, which organises your incoming messages into Personal, Notifications and Newsletters with Personal at the top. When messages have been read but not filed they move to the Seen section, and if you want to come back to them later you can Snooze them so they’ll pop up at a more convenient time. Snoozing works across all your devices, so if you Snooze a message on your phone it’ll be snoozed on your Mac too.

One of our favourite features is the Quick Reply, which enables you to set up simple responses for those messages you need to acknowledge but don’t fancy writing a whole response to. Simply set up the Quick Reply messages you want and then choose the correct one for the message – so, for example, we’ve got a ‘thanks, but this isn’t one for us’ message as well as the default ‘call me’, ‘cool’ and ‘thanks’ responses. The app also works with the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, enabling you to quickly respond or file messages with a single tap.

Email your way

We’ve made Spark our default email client on our Mac, iPad and iPhone because it’s a great way to manage busy inboxes – and it’s very customisable too, so if something isn’t quite right it’s easy to change to suit your own way of working. As we’ll see in our tutorial, you can change how it looks, how messages are signed, and even set your own keyboard shortcuts for common tasks.

We particularly like the way the Smart Inbox can be configured across multiple accounts, so for example you can have all your personal emails across multiple accounts shown in the same group, or split them on a per-account basis. If email makes you anxious or irritable, Spark might just be the solution.