Spark Email Software
Spark Email Software
I rarely blog about technology now, focusing on cars and food. I’ve recently switched from Apple Mail to Spark for my personal and business email so thought it worth a write up.
As an email (SMTP and IMAP) and messaging (XMPP) specialist I’ve tried many of the ‘top’ email programs in recent years but all have tripped themselves up during installation, migration, platform support or usability but Spark has nailed it. Well, almost, there are some privacy concerns but as an IT security professional I can mitigate those rather than complain about them.
What do I like about Spark, here is the short version.
- Installation across all my (Apple) devices was simple and fast
- The software seems to be ‘sitting on’ the existing Apple email database
- The user interface is great on all devices
- It has some interesting novel features
Let’s take a look at the above.
The installation went remarkable well on all devices and I liked the fact that my email accounts were ‘magically’ transferred from one device to the other. This is really important as it takes the pain out of getting started. The downside of this is that the vendor must be storing these in the cloud so there is a security and privacy concern there. How safe are my account passwords!
I quickly realised that my historical email was visible in Spark, this is great as the usual export then import from Apple Mail to whatever I’m trying next nearly always takes ages and fails at some point causing me to ditch the software. I’m guessing Apple Mail uses an ‘accessible’ database like SQLite or similar and Spark is sitting on that. The possible downside to that is if they do, does that mean Apple don’t use an encrypted password protected database?
What can I say, I go to great lengths to make my own software user interfaces look great and be nice to use so it’s important to have the same in my life when using other peoples software. There’s something simple but efficient in the way Spark looks and works.
The same left and right swipes on mobile and desktop have become an important part of getting email done. Swipes for marking as read, archive, pin and delete are great. The ‘Smart’ inbox views separating email from people and newsletters, read and unread is essential in keeping on top of all 6 of my mailboxes.
The ability to exclude my personal from work inboxes in the Unified Inbox view is brilliant, I can get work done without being pestered by personal email. This is a major feature for me. Add to this the ability to only get notified of new email from people and ignore newsletters and notifications is a great help.
More features like snoozing email (hiding it) so it’s not bothering me in my inbox as unread, and scheduling outgoing email are great. I do wonder though how the scheduling works, is copy of my email being stored in Spark’s cloud, and what are the privacy issues related to that?
As a messaging professional the integration of chat and email so we can discuss emails with co-workers is intriguing, but I’d need the Teams feature active which is difficult in one person business!
Being able to setup email templates, delegate and discuss email look like great features if they are implemented with more thought than previous attempts over the years.
I’m a week in and have only scratched the surface, simply using Spark as I have been using Apple Mail, there are many more nice features that I have yet to explore.
If you can get your head around some niggling privacy and security concerns, perhaps because you’ve already moved your sensitive data comms and sharing out of your email system, then it’s worth a look.