Spark: the Best Free Alternative to Mail for iPhone, iPad and Mac

One of the main functionalities that Steve Jobs showed in his day when presenting the iPhone and iPad was to be able to see the email in our hand. However, the native Mail app present in these is not as complete as many of us would like and this is where alternatives to it such as Spark come in, our favorite to synchronize all our email accounts in a single interface. We tell you all about her below.

Spark is completely free

You may have never used Spark before and may not have even heard of it, despite its popularity on the App Store. This is a cross-platform application that is available for iPhone, iPad and Mac , although it is also present on Android and Windows. What strikes us the most is that it is a completely free application to download, but it does not contain purchases within the form of subscriptions or advanced versions, since it makes all the functionalities available to users. It is developed by Readdle , a popular company that also develops other popular applications for iOS.

Spark: the Best Free Alternative to Mail

Customizable interface to your liking

Although this is ultimately a matter of personal taste, the truth is that Spark has a very visually striking interface on all devices and that, above all, it is very intuitive and practically from the moment you start using it you already know how to handle it. Perhaps one of the most interesting sections that it has are the gestures with which to interact with emails, being able to configure them to taste from the settings and having quick options such as archiving, marking as read, sending it to spam or deleting it. It should be noted the same intuitive appearance when writing the emails, being able to also add predefined templates for our emails, such as the possibility of inserting signatures.

Gestos de Spark

Multiple accounts can be placed in the same tray

If you are in a user profile that manages several email accounts, mixed between personal and professional, this will be one of the functions that you value the most. Any type of email account can be connected, regardless of its server. From the classic Gmail emails from Google to those from Microsoft Outlook, through those private servers. And best of all, it can be synchronized in a single tray so you don’t have to switch accounts.

How Your Smart Inbox Works

Precisely in line with the above, Spark offers an intelligent tray capable of filtering emails by their importance. All this is determined based on your interactions with emails and senders, making the most recent not necessarily always come first. In any case, it is a tray that can be hidden, in such a way that you have the traditional one if you have not just adapted to what it offers in this section.

Spark en Mac

Postpone emails as one of its advantages

We are not going to deny it, there are many situations in which it is not good for us to answer an email and not even read it. However, if we try to forget about it, the notification may disappear and we forget completely. This is where one of Spark’s star functions comes into play, which allows you to postpone emails so that the notification can be missed later. There are several options, from selecting a specific time of the same day, to doing it for tomorrow or any other selectable day. In fact, it is possible to configure these parameters automatically so that with just two touches we can choose a certain time.

Spark allows you to easily schedule emails

Another advantage that we find about Spark is being able to schedule emails. If we don’t like receiving emails at the wrong time either, why would someone else like it? By simply pressing the corresponding button when writing an email, you can schedule the delivery for any other time or date, being able to choose the one that we think is most convenient so that the email is read as soon as possible. It is also useful if you want to schedule monthly corporate emails or similar.

Emails programados Spark

Reminders for unanswered emails

In most messaging applications we have some type of signal that shows us if the message has been received and read by the recipient. Unfortunately that does not exist in Spark, but it does have a reminder function when emails are sent, so that we can select a date and time in which to receive a notification telling us if the email has been answered or not. That way there is no need to have to manually check the mailbox to know if they have responded to us or not.

Has its own calendar management

If you often receive appointments for meetings or any other type of event, you can quickly select a date and time for that event to be added to the Spark calendar. Then you will be able to see your upcoming appointments in various formats and even receive reminders. Of course, the downside of this is that it does not synchronize (or at least not quite well) with calendar applications such as the native Apple or Google Calendar, which would be a good point to consider this function as one of the most interesting by Spark.

Calendarios Spark Mac

It has bad things, although they are not so bad

Obviously not everything is perfect and the fact that it is such a complete application makes us see it as one of the main email applications, but Spark also has bad aspects. In our experience of years using the platform we have been able to verify that the synchronization is not as fast at times as we would like. If you use the application on several devices and, for example, delete several emails from the inbox, you will see how when you open Spark on another device it takes a few seconds for the emails to disappear. It’s bad? Not at all, but the fact that this occurs even with a good internet connection becomes somewhat annoying at times. The same happens with the scheduled messages that are in the outbox, since they do not always appear on all devices even if they are correctly programmed.

In any case, we believe that it is a really complete application and that it offers a very good experience on all devices, so we strongly recommend downloading it. The fact that it is also free is another important factor, especially if we take into account that it even has more functions than some others that are paid.