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Spark is building its way to prominence among email applications

Ondrej Holzman
18

When I was choosing a successor at the beginning of this year Mailbox, the choice was ultimately made for a very simple reason on Airmail, as it also offered a Mac app. Even then, however, I was eyeing Spark from the successful Readdle team, who have now finally delivered a Mac app as well. And Airmail suddenly has a big competitor.

But I would like to start a little more broadly, because there are endless reams of paper that can be written about e-mails and all matters related to it. However, it is always crucial in the end that everyone approaches electronic mail completely differently, and the principles that I or anyone else use for administration are not generally valid everywhere and for everyone.

In recent weeks, two Slovak colleagues have written very good articles on the topic of e-mail productivity, which describe the options for managing e-mails. Monika Zbínová divides users into several groups:

Email users could be divided into several groups. Those who:

a) they have inboxes full of unread messages and with a bit of luck and time they will get to the most important ones to which they (hopefully) reply
b) read and respond to administrations continuously
c) they maintain order in the administrations according to some system of their own
d) they use the inbox zero method

I don't number the groups on purpose, so as not to highlight some way of managing emails. Everyone has their own system, and while for some people e-mail is just one of the methods of personal virtual communication (and they use others much more - e.g. Messenger, Whatsapp, etc.), for others it can be the main sales tool in the company.

Over the years, everyone has probably found their own way to e-mail (Monika further describes in more detail, how she completely changed her approach), but as a really productive way of managing the entire inbox, the Inbox Zero method, where I approach each message as a task that needs to be solved in different ways, has definitely proven to be the most effective for me. In the ideal case, the result is an empty inbox, where it makes no sense to store already solved messages.

More details about this method writes on his blog Oliver Jakubík:

If we want to talk about e-mail productivity, we need to change our view of what e-mail administrations (or at least work ones) really are these days.

(...)

If we start to perceive e-mail messages as tasks that we need to process, we will probably end up relying on the phenomenon of hundreds (in some cases even thousands) of e-mail messages that have been read and solved in the past, which - without knowing why - still have their place in the folder Received mail.

In trainings, I always say that it is something similar to the following example:

Imagine that on your way home in the evening you stopped by the mailbox that you have by the gate. You unlock the mailbox, take out and read the delivered letters - and instead of taking the mail with you to the apartment (so that you can pay checks, create an invoice from the mobile operator, etc.), you would return all the already opened and read letters back into the mailbox; and you would additionally repeat this procedure regularly day after day.

You definitely don't have to follow the Inbox Zero method, but it is becoming more and more popular, as evidenced by new applications that remember to clean the inbox with their functions. I was already able to customize Airmail with its really large setting options so that its operation corresponded to the Inbox Zero method, and it is no different in the case of Spark, which after a year and a half on iOS has finally reached Mac as well.

Having an app for all the devices I use is key for me for a mail client because it doesn't make sense for me to manage email on my iPhone any differently than on a Mac. Moreover, two different clients do not even communicate properly. That's why I tested Spark properly for the first time only now.

Since I was happy with Airmail, I installed Spark mainly as a test to see what it could do. But to make sense, I transferred all my mailboxes to it and used it exclusively. And finally, after a few days, I knew that I would almost certainly not return to Airmail. But gradually.

The mention of the development team behind Spark was not accidental. Readdle is a truly proven and recognized brand whose applications you can be sure of quality design, long-term support and, above all, keeping up with the times. That's also why I didn't think too much about the fact that possibly leaving Airmail would cost me 15 euros, which I once paid for its apps for iOS and Mac (and they've already been returned several times).

The first thing that positively impressed me about Spark is the graphics and user interface. Not that Airmail is ugly, but Spark is just another level. Some people don't deal with such things, but they do for me. And now finally to the important part.

To begin with, it must be said that in terms of customization options, Spark does not have Airmail, but even that can be its advantage. Too many buttons and options put off Airmail for many users.

What I was most curious about about Spark was its main boast – Smart Inbox, which intelligently ranks incoming mail and tries to display the most important messages first, while newsletters stay to the side so as not to disturb. Since I treat every message in my inbox the same way, I wasn't sure if the next extension would be useful. But there is something about Smart Inbox.

Spark's smart inbox works by collecting incoming emails from all accounts and sorting them into three main categories: personal, newsletter and announcements. And then he serves them to you in the same order. That way, you should be the first to see messages from the "real people" you're usually looking for. As soon as you read a message from any category, it moves all the way down to the classic inbox. When you need to have a message quickly available for some reason, it can be pinned to the top with a pin.

Sorting into categories is also very important for notifications. Thanks to smart notifications, Spark won't send you a notification when you receive a newsletter or other notifications that you usually don't need to know about immediately. If you have email notifications turned on, this is a really handy feature. (You can set a notification for each new e-mail in the classic way.) You can also manage each category in batches in Smart Inbox: you can archive, delete or mark as read all newsletters with a single click.

 

You can change the category for each incoming message, if, for example, the newsletter fell into your personal inbox, while Spark is constantly improving the sorting. The entire Smart Inbox can be easily turned off, but I have to say that I like this addition to the classic inbox. It's pretty much a given that you can use gestures for different actions like delete, snooze, or pin up for any email.

What else Spark offers against the competition are quick replies like "Thanks!", "I agree" or "Call me". The default English answers can be rewritten to Czech, and if you often answer messages in a similar short way, quick replies in Spark are very effective. Others, on the other hand, will welcome the integration of the calendar directly into the application, which makes it faster to respond to invitations, because you immediately have an overview of whether you are free.

Already standard today are functions such as smart search, which makes it easier to search all mailboxes, the ability to attach attachments from third-party services (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive) as well as to open them or work with them in various ways.

Against Airmail, I still miss a few features on Spark, others, useful, are extra, but the developers are now processing all the feedback they receive, especially for the Mac application, and already released the first update (1.1), which brought several improvements. Personally, I missed the ability to assign a color to each account so that the messages in the inbox could be distinguished at a glance. Spark 1.1 can already do this.

I believe that in the future Spark will also learn to communicate with other third-party applications (which Airmail can do), such as 2Do, and that there will be handy features like sending an email later or delaying a message to the desktop, which other email applications can do . Delayed sending is useful when, for example, you write emails at night but want to send them in the morning. When it comes to snoozing, Spark has quite a lot of customization options, but it can't yet snooze a message on iOS so that it shows up when you open the app on your Mac.

In any case, Spark is already a really strong player in the field of e-mail clients, which has recently become extremely active (see below for example NewtonMail). And what is also very important, Spark is available completely free of charge. While other applications from Readdle are charged, with Spark the developers bet on a different model. They want to keep the application free for individual use, and there will be paid variants for teams and companies. Spark is just at the beginning. For version 2.0, Readdle is preparing big news with which it wants to erase the difference between internal and external communication within companies. We have something to look forward to.

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