Manage email effectively
Keep your inbox in order with a more powerful email client
Free FROM sparkmailapp.com FEATURES Pin or snooze email. Intelligent sorting, advanced collaboration tools, natural language search
Apple’s Mail app has barely changed in years and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, lags some way behind third-party alternatives in terms of features.
Spark is available for macOS and iOS and provides many features that are lacking in Mail. There’s a unified inbox and automatic categorisation which prioritises 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 real-time chat while this happens. You can also use autofill and custom templates to save time. You can use shared inboxes to manage things like support or information addresses. You can 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 (about £6) per user per month, unlocks lots more storage and more generous sharing including unlimited shared inboxes. Spark makes Apple’s Mail look positively prehistoric and it works across all your Apple devices including Apple Watch. For the intelligent email sorting alone it’s worth a look, especially these days when most people receive tons of email.