— Spark for iOS
One of the best email apps on iOS now looks as good as it works
Spark is one of our favorite email apps for iOS and its recent upgrade only enhances that position. As well as an interface overhaul, Spark has a bunch of new features that allow you to be even more productive, and one or two that just add a bit of fun.
A change of typeface and overall look and feel are the most obvious improvements, and there’s also a new Dark Mode. However, the best additions are a little deeper. You can now customize actions to designate which ones are shown at the bottom of an email message. So, instead of having a tool bar of actions including reply, archive, forward, and snooze, you can now swap one or more for, say, move, spam, or save as PDF.
You can also label a contact as important on your iPhone — which then dictates how incoming
messages from that contact are treated — and have it synced with your Mac or iPad. Talking of iPad, the iPad OS version of Spark allows you to have two
Spark windows open side by side. And the fun addition?
You can choose to display avatars alongside email messages in your inbox.
Spark’s strength has always been the app’s productivity and collaboration features, and those remain excellent.
You can create a team, share drafts, and delegate received messages. You can add one team member for free, but you will have to pay for the premium version at $6.39 a month per user if you want to add more than that.
Services are another great feature of Spark — they allow you to add other apps like, say Things or Evernote, and send a received email to them from within Spark, making it easy to create a to–do item or a note from an email message. And its Smart Inbox allows you to specify how messages are organized, though we couldn’t find a way to, for example, display pinned read messages above unread newsletters. There are a raft of other productivity features such as a smart folder for filtering messages, templates, the ability to snooze incoming messages, or schedule outgoing ones.
This upgrade has improved noticeably, even if not hugely significantly, what was already an excellent email client.
THE BOTTOM LINE. A very solid upgrade to one of the best email apps available on the iPhone or iPad.