Manage email effectively
Keep your inbox in order with a more powerful email client
SPARK
Free From sparkmailapp.com
Features Pin or snooze email, intelligent sorting, advanced collaboration tools, natural language search
Apple’s Mail app has changed little in recent years, lagging behind in its rivals in terms of features — although that’s expected to change to some extent with the launch of macOS Ventura in the fall.
Until we see what that update brings, there’s always Spark — a free email app for macOS and iOS that comes with many of the abilities that Mail lacks, including a unified inbox and automatic categorization that prioritizes email from real people while sorting newsletters and notifications into separate folders. You can pin or snooze email threads and even fine–tune snoozing for preset amounts of time.
Searching is another area where Mail’s abilities are quite basic, but Spark enables you to use natural language search terms like “attachments from David” to find things without having to think like a computer. You can also search for links and files within email using natural language — think “pictures sent last week” for example — and create and save custom searches.
FULL OF FEATURES
Unlike Mail, Spark also offers team collaboration so you can, for example, have private discussions about an email without having to CC or BCC people in, and collaborate on emails, inviting people to contribute and edit to them, with real–time update on who’s doing what. A side chat window can be popped up for live chat while this happens. You can also use autofill and custom templates to save time. And you can use shared inboxes to manage things like support or information addresses. You can even schedule emails to be sent at specific times, set follow–up reminders if emails have not been replied to, and easily manage multiple email signatures.
Remarkably, the core feature set is entirely free and would work well for an individual user, even offering basic collaboration tools. The Premium version, which costs $6.39 per user per month, unlocks lots more storage and more generous sharing including unlimited shared inboxes. Spark makes Apple’s Mail look prehistoric and it works across all your Apple devices including Apple Watch.