Spark iOS Email App Delivers Smart Twists

"Like your email again" is the promise of the Spark email app for iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. It aims to keep you productive with smart twists on ordinary emails, such as an intelligent inbox, a snooze function, and effective signature management.

Take Control of Your Inbox

Spark sorts incoming emails into personal, newsletter, and notification boxes, so you can reply to important ones and clean up the rest. You can pin important emails to the top of your inbox with a swipe.

You also can swipe emails to snooze them for another day. Snoozed messages disappear from the inbox temporarily, and you can customize the snooze option to shelve emails for the weekend, next week, or until a particular date.

Changed your mind, or accidentally pinned or snoozed the wrong email? Just shake your device, or tap Undo to undo the last action.

Smart Search

Spark responds quickly and accurately to natural-language searches, such as attachment from Joe. Search for files and links inside the emails using phrases like file from Joe sent yesterday.

If you use the same search term often, you can save it or create a smart folder to locate emails that trigger your search term automatically.

Spark for Teams

No other email app works as well for teams as Spark, which allows you to create, discuss, and share emails with your colleagues. You can invite your coworkers or teammates to create emails together in real time; then, you can use a side chat to talk privately to your team members and give feedback about the email.

Attachments in the Cloud

You can save email attachments directly to the cloud with Spark, which works with Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, One Drive, and iCloud Drive. You can also attach cloud-based files to your emails.

Personalization

Spark supports a great deal of customization, so you can set up the app to work just the way you like:

• Choose up to three widgets to appear at the top of your inbox or from a widget button at the bottom. Examples include Attachments, Recently Seen, and Calendar.
• Tap to add or remove items from the Spark sidebar. You can put your own smart folders here or access your calendar from the inbox.
• Use any of the four different swipes available to perform tasks that you designate.
• In addition to plain text, formatting such as boldface, italics, and underlining can help you communicate clearly in emails you send from Spark.

Reminders

Spark's Reminders feature helps you keep track of your emails. Set a Reminder to notify you at a specific date and time if you haven't received a reply from an email you sent. Send it and forget it, until Spark reminds you that you haven't heard back. That's especially useful if you tend not to follow up when you should.

Smart Notifications

Smart Notifications notify you only when you receive an important email. This feature works on your Apple Watch, too. You can even issue a brief reply directly from your Watch.

Signatures

Here's a feature you won't find in most email interfaces: Spark automatically identifies and sets up email signatures for you. When you compose a message, you can flip through all those signatures just by swiping. This saves time and effort and helps you give your emails a polished, professional look.

Email Account Support

If you set up more than one email account in Spark, your inbox collects messages from all accounts. Like so much in Spark, this setting is easily configurable, and you can separate categories by account, for example, or exclude certain messages from particular accounts.

Adding the most popular email services including iCloud Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook.com is easy. Spark supports manual IMAP and Microsoft Exchange setup as well; however, Spark doesn't support POP email.

Spark makes setting up alias addresses easy so that you can use multiple email addresses with one account. You cannot specify different sender names or outgoing SMTP servers for aliases, though.

However you set up the many options and functions that Spark offers, the app automatically syncs your choices across all the iCloud devices you use. That gives you a powerful email assistant you can access from whatever device and location you're using.