Readdle today released a new addition to its giant collection of productivity apps for iOS with the debut of Spark. Spark is described in short as “fast and smart email for your iPhone” while its core features include tons of customization options and intelligent notification and filtering options that help take the stress out of email. Though Spark is only the latest third party email app to land on the iPhone, it is the first solid email client I’ve used on the Apple Watch so far. How does it compare to Apple’s own Mail app in this case?
Out of the box, Spark lets you easily plug in your iCloud, Google, Exchange/Outlook, or Yahoo email account to offer a unified inbox experience. I set up Spark using my Google Apps account, and the login screen featured 1Password’s extension for filling in my email and password with Touch ID. Very handy.
Next up, Spark asks you which type of notification you prefer from the iPhone email app. You can choose between three options: standard notifications, smart notifications, or no notifications. I typically don’t want to miss a single email on my Mac, but Spark’s smart notification feature promises to only notify you about emails you care; this seems fine for iPhone and even better for Apple Watch.
After first plugging in your email credentials, you land in your inbox for the first time. Spark resembles Google’s Inbox email app with a floating compose button on the bottom right, and you can quickly swipe threads left or right to archive/delete or pin/snooze a message similar to Dropbox’s Mailbox app. The toolbar at the top lets you jump into a view to see only your snoozed messages or archived messages.
You can also drill into search from here with natural language search options like ‘forwarded emails from Mark Gurman in March” and Spark will show you just that. A star button lets you favorite your searches for easily using the same query again in the future, or you can reuse recent searches again without favoriting.
Spark lets you switch between your smart inbox and full inbox from the basement menu on the right side. The smart inbox is useful as it separates new messages from the rest of your inbox; Spark can also separate messages from important people and newsletter subscriptions. From here you can also view an inbox that only shows attachments or any of your other mailboxes associated with your email account.
The settings section here is where the real customization begins. You can set emails to archive after you’ve seen them, change what actions goes with which swipe directions, toggle email read receipts on or off (neat!), setup different email signatures which Spark lets you easily choose when writing messages, and plug in other services. At launch, these services include Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, Readability, Pocket, Evernote, OneNote, and Instapaper.
Over on the Apple Watch, Spark is even more impressive. Unlike Apple’s Mail app on the watch, Spark allows you to actually respond to messages that you receive using quick replies or dictation. Apple’s Messages app offers the same features, but Apple’s Mail app on Apple Watch limits responses to flagging, marking as unread, or deleting.
While I usually don’t want to be dictating longer messages into my watch, the ability should be just as convenient as replying to text messages or iMessages as you can already do. Spark isn’t lighting fast on the Apple Watch as it relies on pulling information from the iPhone, but it works well enough considering that’s the state of third party apps for now. I haven’t seen a better Apple Watch email app yet.
There’s certainly a whole lot more to Spark’s customization options and smart filtering behaviors, but on the surface Spark is an easy-to-use and potentially more capable email app on the iPhone. On the Apple Watch, Spark is a must-have if you want to do more quick actions than what Apple allows in its own app.
Spark is available completely free for iPhone and Apple Watch from the App Store.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
I’m interested in this because the Apple mail app is bad for the iPhone and even worse for the Watch. Gmail for Watch is almost unacceptably bad, but great on iPhone. This app will allow me to discontinue using the aforementioned email apps.
Readdle make some excellent apps. It’s no surprise that they have put a great deal of thought into this as well. Having said that, I have an inherent resistance toward 3rd party email apps, as I really love the OS integration and ability for Siri to read my emails when I’ve got my hands full.
Having hundreds of apps on my phone already, I’m not fond of the idea of having multiple mail apps configured and then having to decide which of them to click for a specific thing. It’s an uphill battle for any developer trying to assert itself over default apps.
At least until 2038, when Apple may eventually allow sufficient API integration for 3rd party apps to function as natively as the built-in ones.
It may be long after that before the allow such a thing.
How many years have users been asking for themes?
This is exciting. Readdle makes excellent apps, and the last few months I’ve been testing every email app. I’m very curious to see what they have here. I just hope it has 2 deal-breaker features. 1. Gmail alias support. 2. Option to not display images until I want them loaded.
Been using ScannerPro for many years. Wish they’d push the envelope there a little more though. Nested folders would be really nice too.
And NOPE on both accounts. Deleted. Sad. Oh well.
What’s happened?
Won’t connect to fastmail’s smtp or imap servers. Could there be a bug? Apple Mail and CloudMagic do not have this problem connecting to mail.messagingengine.com over ports 995 and 465.
So it looks like it supports fastmail if you login with your fastmail username/pw, however I use my own custom domain instead of the fastmail.com / fastmail.fm ones… so the app is not useful for me to respond to emails, just receive them.
Can I ask you to contact our support at rdsupport@readdle.com? We’ll try to help you:)
I’m a Mailbox app user – use it on my phone, ipad and desktop. I’d like to try Spark but it may just end up being too much trouble to switch for me.
Nah. I switch email clients every other month. IMAP makes it simple.
Mailbox app user here aswell.. I like having the same setup on all my devices and Spark would only work on iPhone.. will skip for now.. until they release it for all Apple devices I have; like Mailbox.
We have plans to create version for iPad and for Mac:)
that’s great news.. btw, will the settings I configure on the iPhone app be synced over to the iPad and Mac (signatures, folders/labels, etc).. Mailbox allows this using the dropbox login..
I’m looking forward for iPad version since it’s been great to have mail app on iPad. Hope you can make it there as far as you can. To be truth, I will compare it with CloudMagic and Outlook, but I have high hope with Spark. Thanks!
Actually we are only working on new updates to iPhone version now, but it’s a good idea for cross platform version.
definitely worth it. Now I’m looking for a suitable mac app that works well in conjunction with spark
I’d really like to try this, but it’s hard to see how it could be a great experience without a companion OS X app. The problem is that some features – e.g. Snooze – are app specific rather than email account specific. So if I Snooze a message on my iPhone or watch, and then get reminded about it later while I’m on my Mac, I have to go back to my iOS device to see the alert? That’s not very compelling…
Exchange server connection doesn’t work (but it works with other email/cal applications)
same here … any clue?
please
Is it Active Sync account?
Same here. Company says they don’t use IMAP accounts. Any plans to rectify?
I can’t set up my Yahoo or Outlook accounts, but iCloud was fine. But notifications look better on my Pebble than when the message comes through from Mail, for some reason.
New update will bring a lot of improvements, so hope Spark will work fine with your accounts. But there is no support for pop coming soon.
Anybody with information about password storage? Someone posted on the Facebook page they would transfer passwords to their server (at least I know of other apps doing that)!? This would be a showstopper for me. I don’t want to share my IMAP-login.
In the FAQs I find no information about it…
Nope, we don’t collect your personal info. Check our blog post with details https://readdle.com/blog/2015/06/how-we-handle-your-account-information-in-spark/
App is freaking awesome and has totally replaced Mailbox for me. The key is that it supports pretty much all email services, which Mailbox, inexplicably, has never gotten around to.
My only gripe(s): there seems to be a badge count bug, because my badge count never updates unless I open the app. Plus it seems like there is a problem with notifications clearing on the Apple Watch after I have already handled the email on my phone. That’s a bit annoying. Another small annoyance: the “tomorrow” snooze defaults to the current time of day – that is to say it snoozes 24 hours. I prefer the way Mailbox does it by simply snoozing until the next morning @ 8:00 AM. Makes more sense that way because I usually want to review things first thing in the morning when I get back to work. This is less of an annoyance and more of a feature request: Add the ‘long hold’ functionality of Mailbox for automatically deleting/snoozing/moving emails.
But, overall, this is the best email client I’ve found. I think if Mailbox would get off of their asses and support other services then it would still be the best, but at this point it looks like Dropbox has basically abandoned it.
Notifications appear to be broken on the iPhone and apple watch. Looking through the reviews on the app store this seems to be an issue for multiple users. The interface seems to be the most promising from a 3rd party email app, however if you are not notified when you have new mail it really is pointless…
Lastly it would to let me setup an Exchange Server account.
Hi Rob! Notifications will be improved in the nearest future, but you can contact Readdle support team at rdsupport@readdle.com.
It is not possible to connect to Exchange without using IMAP. My company does not support that. Will this be possible in the next release?
• Filter your inbox to only show messages that are unread, flagged, or have attachments, with a single tap.
• Quickly find the right messages, people and files by typing just a few letters. http://www.ieenews.com/best-iphone-email-app-outlook-gmail-apple-mail-ios-best-email-app-for-iphone/
• Outlook shows people you communicate with most often, and lets you conveniently drill down to see all related emails, meetings and files. Best Email app for iPhone.
1. Microsoft Outlook
2. Mailbox – By DropBox.
3. Hop – email messenger
Best Email app for iPhone
Now that Mailbox has been discontinued by Dropbox, I went searching for a replacement.
I went through many apps that worked but just didn’t appeal to me.
I find that Spark ticked all the boxes that I needed and done so with a great user interface. It has been great to triage my inbox and still give me cability of easily moving emails to segregated folders.
Definitely worth trying out, especially since it is free.