Spark Mail + AI: Email Inbox Reviews

by Mlmlmsm

Prior to version 2.0 my rating was 4 stars. Spark is a solid app with a lot of great features that the native Mail app lacks. The Smart Inbox and notifications are great as well as the Snooze, scheduled delivery, bulk inbox actions, and app extensions. However, I have had a constant struggle with bugginess since the v2.0 release. Their support and dev team have been responsive and released several updates, but too many remain and more keep surfacing with each release. My exchange inboxes have stopped syncing across devices (even though they sync fine in Mail), emails show Subject details for other emails, Apple Watch app will not open anything, and sporadic ‘load message errors’ where messages will not display, among other issues. I experienced another eye opening quirk while traveling in an area with weaker connectivity where I could barely send or receive emails via Spark, while the native Mail app worked just fine. Apparently, your messages make an extra stop on Spark’s servers along the way where certain app features are executed. Privacy concerns aside, somehow the communication between SparkMailAI and their servers is more prone to connectivity quality issues than the native Mail app. Back to Mail for me.

by Vmartin7

I previously rated SparkMailAI 4 stars, but lately I can barely even open my emails. It takes FOREVER just to load a single email, and it does that with each and every email I try to open. I’m using an iPhone 10 on WiFi, and no other apps are lagging, so I know it’s something with SparkMailAI from when they updated, because it’s been like this for a while now. Please fix, I’ve been using SparkMailAI for almost three years now but I can’t deal with this much longer.

Previous review:
I started using SparkMailAI for my email and got my boss onto it as well. We both love it because with us being entrepreneurs it helps us to declutter the day and group things much more effectively. The one thing we've noticed however are we don't seem to get the notifications for our emails as easily. I'm not sure if Spark is just not pulling the data enough or what, but even when we do get the notification I can barely hear it with my sound all the way up. We both noticed we've been late on responding to emails because of this issue. Overall I love it and will continue to use it but I hope they try and find a way to make it easier for us to see our notifications.

by Janprint

Latest review:
The last two updates have made Spark crash and unusable on both my iPads. I’m sad to have to go back to Apple Mail. At first I thought that my old iPad (which I keep at one remote location) was too slow or old to keep working with Spark. But the latest update shut out my iPad Pro. Yes, I’ve restarted and all devices have the latest OS updates. I can’t trouble-shoot because it won’t stay open long enough for me to see what’s going on. Too bad because I was looking forward to the calendar feature. I already use Readdle’s Calendars 5 and like it. I’ll check in with updates every so often to see if there’s an update that gets along with my devices. Spark still works with my iPhone 6 and Apple Watch but I really prefer something that works on all my devices.

Old review: Love it—seamless. Spark is seamless across all my devices including the Apple Watch. It's clean, attractive, and the user-customizable interface makes it MY email app so I can use it the way I think. AND get this, I had a question which was answered correctly the first time by a friendly app representative. The problem was me, not them--I forgot to fill something in. Five stars for this program.

by RJ1982-jshdjsbhsjfbv

I know only about two iOS email clients which support Evernote integration. Spark and airmail. Airmail doesn’t even display my work exchange mails and spark seems to have overall the better features. That is IF it decides to work. I deleted my email account numerous times and even deleted all data with spark and registered from scratch 4-5 times. Which is by the way the official support answer lol. Either emails cannot be sent, or the email body has a load error, or the calendar doesn’t work. Lastly I had an global calendar usage exceeded even though I am only messing with my gmail and exchange which on occasion works. When it works it’s fantastic. Then next morning suddenly my exchange account is simply not present anymore go figure....
I would pay for this (one time not subscription please) to eliminate the bugs. How the company can pull a subscription model off is beyond me considering all the bugs. Of I make the math of what a team would end up costing via subscription there should be almost no bugs here and if there are some they should be resolved quickly. This seems not the case unfortunately. Well I’ll keep searching for an alternative and maybe try another update later.

by KStudd

Please fix this! I use SparkMailAI for work and I can’t continue to use if all the emails I worked on in the office is still in my app when I get home. The sync needs to work better. I’m back on Apple mail app until this is fixed. Once fixed, I’ll update my rating once again.

*****I don't know what they fixed in the last update but the exchange sync is back and working perfectly. While at work, I manage my emails through outlook. I delete emails and file emails into folders. When I get home and open SparkMailAI , allot of those emails are still in my inbox. NOT ANY MORE!!! Its great and it syncs completely everytime and not partially. Now I'm worried about future updates. Please don't break this again. Keep up the great work at Readdle!!*******I use to love SparkMailAI , I used it for my personal email as well as my work. But now I went back to the apple stock app because this one no longer syncs with exchange. While at work, I can delete email, move emails to folders, etc. When I get home and open SparkMailAI, most of the emails I already saw at work are still there in my inbox. That never happens with the apple tock mail app. I have to manage my emails twice now with Spark. Fix that and I might go back.

by Jaab3rd

Spark is generally great, when it works. However, snooze is perpetually broken. In prior versions, large numbers of snoozed items would lose their snooze date and revert to “someday”, forcing a periodic review of the snoozed folder to ensure nothing had gone AWOL. Now, snoozed items randomly appear at the top of the inbox immediately after being snoozed, labeled with their correct snooze date, or randomly appear in the inbox based on their original unsnoozed date with no indication they were ever snoozed. The latter is particularly bad, as there’s no way to know when this happens other than to keep the inbox empty or to remember everything that was snoozed and to notice when emails don’t reappear on schedule; if I could do that, I wouldn’t need snooze in the first place.

Spark typically works well enough and often enough that my periodic reviews of potentially less buggy alternatives always lead me back to Spark, but the continuing snooze bugs are very, very frustrating.

The bug appears to be correlated with having multiple devices running Spark and possibly taking Spark out of the foreground on iOS or closing it on macOS without first forcing a synchronization. However, religiously forcing synchronization doesn’t make the problem go away entirely. Avoiding using Spark on iOS while it is open on macOS also seems to help, as does avoiding using Spark on multiple devices altogether. It’s almost certainly a multi-client synchronization bug of some type.

by Amanda_anguel

I’ve used Spark for the past 3 years. I have 5 e-mail addresses because I am a teacher at several schools and a law student. I turned to Spark to better organize my email. However, I now dread having to open SparkMailAI every morning. My “flagged” emails are overflowing. My “seen” emails are overflowing. I can’t figure out how to unsubscribe from emails without having to physically go into each email to click “Unsubscribe”. SparkMailAI does NOT sync between iPad, iPhone, and Mac which is frustrating because if you delete emails on your iPhone you can then expect to see them UNREAD when you check your email on your Mac. Email signatures that you create on your iPhone will not sync to your Mac or iPad. Also, if you do not use your iPad for a week (Spark installed) - you will be inundated with zombie emails that were replied to or deleted already. Additionally, there’s no option to create email lists/groups. This is frustrating because as a teacher I like to create email lists of my students. Aside from that my Smart folder is unorganized. Emails marked as spam still come through to my inbox. The added team features are just unnecessary bells and whistles. I’m in the process of transferring my emails to Edison Mail. Spark has become headache.

by CookieCookie319

I used to love Spark and recommended it to so many family members and friends who began using it as well. I was able to use the widget to preview my inbox (which was my main reason for getting it) and the intuitive design helped me stay on top of my emails for the first time.

But SparkMailAI continues to work less and less well for me :( At first it would log me out of email address #1 very infrequently. Then it began to happen more frequently until it was occurring at least weekly. I last reconnected this email address 4 days ago. Now, SparkMailAI has disconnected me from all 3 email addresses I had on there and will not allow me to login using the right credentials (it worked online with them). Since I can no longer connect my email to Spark, nor be certain the connection will remain stable, I will be looking elsewhere for a new email app :( I’m actually sad because I loved Spark and loved showing it to different people but I need access to my email and only want to recommend products that work well to people who trust me. I hope these ongoing issues are resolved and thank you for the past year or so of service. I appreciated it and wish the developing team all the best!

by SJD

I love Spark’s design, swiping interface, and the way it groups emails by People, Newsletters, Seen, etc. But I’ve started to lose faith in it showing me what I need to see, which feels like a dealbreaker: Notifications *usually* seem to come through, except when they don’t. Lately, clicking a notification crashes SparkMailAI rather than opening. If I use the notification actions to delete right from the notification, half the time the email is not deleted when I view Gmail in the browser. The hardest thing for me is search- it just doesn’t find everything. In particular, it feels like it never finds anything that was archived in Outlook. Or it’ll show only the most recent email in a thread with no way to see the full chain. I don’t want to use the Outlook app, but I’ve been forced to sign in through the browser just to find emails… Lastly, this may be personal preference, but I hate the 5-second delay in sending… I’ve had a few emails not get sent bc I switched away from SparkMailAI after banging out a quick email. I want to love Spark but am getting frustrated by the dependability of core features.

by Keem0h

Since my beloved gmail app turned sour, I’ve tried so many email apps for my phone. This one has some handy features, I like being able to view all of my new mail across multiple email addresses, it’s still sorted in handy categories. Customizable swipes, sharing features, it’s all great! The layout is simple and straightforward.
My main complaint: if you’re a super multitasker like I am, every second counts, so the lag when I open SparkMailAI, is annoying. If my mail is pushed, why do I have to wait for my inbox to update? If I don’t remember to wait for SparkMailAI to load the newest messages.... that means the message I thought I was clicking is not the newest anymore and has been shuffled out of view and now I have clicked an irrelevant newer message and have to go back to my inbox to scroll to find what I’m looking for. It’s that frustrating feeling like I’m not clicking fast enough. Is it a deal breaker, no. But it’s annoying when you have limited time during the day to check email and now have to remember to mark the accidental email as unread so you remember to deal with it later. Not efficient for me... but I’m sure my issue is probably irrelevant to most.

by P.mousse Esq.

The feature suits most of my needs; the interface is smooth and elegant. Spark has been a happier fit than Newton, which it replaced in my workflow and even than Mailbox, which Newton’s earlier incarnation replaced. I appreciate the coordination with Gmail labels, too, though that could be more robust.

The two shortcomings that most affect me were both noted to the developers long ago. First, there is no starring system, only pinning. Pinning isn’t practical for more than a few items at a time else the folder becomes burdened with clutter. Starring makes it easier to find archived information when needed, without having to sift through dozens of emails containing similar subject matter.

But the major nuisance is the storage bloat. It periodically creeps up to nearly a gigabyte in size, and the only way to clear the cache is to delete and reinstall SparkMailAI . That in turn means signing back in to an assortment of other apps that are linked to Spark. Since I’m a digital artist, my iPad is chronically short on space as it is. A way to clear the cache from within SparkMailAI would be most welcome.

by Ichia

Spark has been my go-to iPad app for years. I prefer to sort through email with Spark on my iPad than through any other method (various apps across all my Apple devices). The way it automatically sorts them, not only by my multiple email accounts, but also by type (ie, people, notifications, newsletters, pins, seen, etc) makes it easy for me to get done what needs to be done.

At one point I dropped it down to 4 stars because of an annoying bug where there were blank spots in my email list on the left and I had no idea if emails were being deleted or moved to “seen” or what happened to them. This makes it hard to fly through spam control and save important emails for later. I sent support an email, they quickly replied with instructions on how to help them track down the bug (screenshots, how to do log report, etc). They replied and said the devs were able to isolate the problem and it would be fixed. Today I received an email from them that the bug was in fact fixed and to test it. After a vigorous testing session it indeed was fixed and I replied to them letting them know all was well.

I’d give 5+ stars if possible because not only is SparkMailAI great but their support is also great. Keep up the good work Readdle!

by Ken Bagby

I have tried many email apps as an alternative to a rather bland, but stable, Apple Mail. Purchased many; they looked so good. But every one developed one or more operational issues where I had to abandon them. I needed an iOS app which had a Mac app. When Spark came around, it just clicked. Features were great, functionality good, and was mostly, but not always, stable. This forced me to consider and then actually abandon Spark. Each time, I gravitated back to Apple Mail where the same blandness frustrated me. Communicated with Readdle and went back to Spark with numerous updates. Finally settled on Spark and it has mostly been wonderful to work with. An occasional quirk makes me wonder but still I stay. It is free but that isn’t the criteria which makes them my go-to Mail App.....I would gladly pay $20 or so for it. I do have other Readdle apps and find them all to be outstanding.

Hope this helps. It isn’t perfect; nothing is. But its functionality has won me over with their increased stability and presence of a MAC app.

by Fhbgvduiytyu

I am speechless. Before I started using SparkMailAI on my Mac and iPhone I used the Outlook app. It was okay and it kind of got the job done. SparkMailAI meets every flaw/bug the Outlook email app had except for one thing! I would really appreciate if you would make SparkMailAI compatible with the Exchange Calendar on Mac and on the iPhone app but mostly on the Mac. I really enjoyed having all of that in one place on the on the Outlook app. It was seamless and very fluid. As an Exchange Calendar is the only Calendar I use I still use the Apple stock calendar app which to me isn’t all that great. If you could put your own great Readdle twist on your calendar in the spark app it would really help me and I’m sure some other people too!! There is one more suggestion, you should implement a voting system for what features you customers really want/need in SparkMailAI but still keep the email services. I think it would lighten up your load on email reading and get the job done. Just a thought.

by Noraa311

Ok so I was very skeptical of another email app. I have way too many emails coming in and in the matter of a week I’m over run with over 500 emails I haven’t cleared. This is truly a game changer. The way it handles emails from real people or emails from applications or emails from newsletters, is...BRILLIANT!! I’m once again able to turn on email notifications but yet get notified on only the emails that matter. If I don’t like the default categorization of an email, I can change it or perhaps just make sure I get notifications from that particular email sender. The “snooze” button is amazing and now that I’ve started working with the team function, this has opened up a new world for my business and co-workers.

Thanks for making such a great app.

All the complaints about sync issues and other features not working properly are old reviews. Look at how amazing it it now and I bet those bad reviews would be much higher now if they tried SparkMailAI again.

by Rowan28549

I used to always feel the need to get my inbox down to having zero unread emails, going through each one (however unimportant) and deciding whether or not to sort it into a folder, keep it in my inbox, or delete it, and going through my emails became a big way for me to procrastinate and waste time. I now use Spark across all my devices, and I love that there isn’t that little red bubble displaying how many unread emails I have in the corner of SparkMailAI icon – my “email anxiety” has pretty much disappeared :) I love how easy it is to scan through multiple emails at a time, and the search function is great (accurate and super fast). The only (very small) thing I wish were different is that I would like to be able to more easily permanently change if a certain type of email from a company or organization is specifically a Newsletter or a Notification, and that the system could learn from my preferences and improve how it organizes my incoming emails. But overall, fantastic and beautifully designed app.

by WorkingIntheCloud

I’ve pretty much tried all of the email apps for iOS and while I use google business in chrome with a lot of plugins on my desktop, this is my new go to mobile email productivity booster. I was a long time user of Newton but when they “shut” it down I switched to Spark. It has enough features that I can duplicate much of my workflow from Gmail on Chrome. There is a subscription component but that is basically for teams and collaboration not for the email component. The basic free subscription to those features is enough for me but if I can get more of my team using this, I wouldn’t have a problem upgrading to the paid tier. At first I thought, “why would I want to take communication out of the email channel” but it actually works. I can pin the email, collaborate on the question/task without the noise of email. Think of it at a basic level like a Slack channel built into the email. I was over moving to a mobile email app and having the product discontinued or acquired (yes, I’m talking about you Mailbox). Readdle isn’t a one trick pony and has a broad app ecosystem. Needless to say, I highly recommend SparkMailAI.

by Kaitlin Roten

THANK YOU!!!!! I’ve been using spark for a few weeks now and I’m in love. I knew what I wanted from an email client but I thought it didn’t exist. I wished I would’ve been using spark YEARS ago. So many emails were getting lost because of my lack of motivation for email and now I’m back in business. I’ve always wanted to be a zero inbox kind of person but the task was so overwhelming. Spark has made it easy and I’m much more focused. I love the snooze feature because before I sometimes needed time to think about a response but I inevitably the email got lost. I’m a business owner so I should respond to emails in a timely way so this has really helped me retain more clients and keep up with email tasks. This really helps me focus when I get interrupted with an email or just need a little more time to think about my response but don’t want to forget about responding (which is what use to happen!) I also love how I can schedule my emails to look more professional sending them more at “business hours”. Email use to be this scary and terrible thing that I had to do, now it really is fun and enjoyable.

by DaveTextFree

I do really want to love SparkMailAI. It has a great feature set. Unfortunately, for the moment it earns one star for me on iOS. First, the latest release freezes, possibly with some bug related to the default signature. While support has been responsive, they have not provided a solution. Therefore, Spark in the latest release is useless to me. Even if I attempt to turn of signatures in settings, it freezes before I can get to the pane to disable it. Also, search just doesn’t work as well as billed. I frequently search for emails with the expected search terms, and the email I’m seeking doesn’t appear on the list. If I go to gmail with the same search, I find it, no problem. Finally, SparkMailAI , on iOS, seems to crash and restart frequently. Many times I open the running app, only to be presented with the startup splash screen. I do hope they stabilize this product.

EDIT: They fixed it quickly! I’m updating my review. They still lose a star for a search function that really needs improvement. But overall, nice response. I do hope they are addressing their quality control behind the scenes and this never happens again.

by Hassaan22

UPDATE: PLEASE fix the latest bug. If I go into any email, and then go back, it filters from my Smart Inbox to the particular Email account that the email is to. This is so frustrating and annoying. Idk how many times in the past week I’ve missed my emails because it auto changed the filter from Smart to one of my specific email accounts.

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Hey, I love SparkMailAI and have been a power user for years, but this issue is starting to really frustrate me and becoming a deal breaker. I have my iPhone, iPad and MacBook with spark. My iPhone and MacBook I use all the time and it perfectly syncs together. My iPad I don’t use that often and sometimes it’s not connected to WiFi at all for weeks at a time. And that also means I don’t sometimes open spark for months at a time (even if iPad is connected to WiFi) When I finally go and open spark on my iPad after a long time, it thinks all emails from the last time I opened spark on iPad to currently, all emails are “New”. So I have 400+ emails as unread. Then when I go to my iPhone or MacBook, my iPad has synced that ALL those emails are unread and now I have 400+ emails marked as unread on all devices It’s the worst. Please fix this

by Domenoak

I have used spark for over two years now and it helps me a great deal with being organized. The features are awesome. I had never thought about how convenient it is to snooze an email and re-schedule it or to transfer it to my to-do list. Since a couple of updates, however, I am increasingly dissatisfied with three major thing that occur: 1) Spark always crashes when I try to open it from the “notifications” menu. So I can’t open the email from there. 2) Whenever I want to open a received file in an email, spark wants to prepare the download. But then, it never opens it. It’s annoying because when I reopen SparkMailAI , it works. 3) When sending an email, spark needs to stay open. If I close SparkMailAI after sending it, spark is not able to process the email further, ao it just stays in the outbox. I realize this is a minir problem but it happened to me a couple of times and it’s just annoying.

So: three stars, with potential for 5 because I love the way SparkMailAI is designed and I use the scanner program as well and the apps work very well together. But this is disappointing.

by LP852

I love this, it helped me clear out thousands of irrelevant emails that have been haunting me for months. I love the search features and smart folders that let me combine folders from different emails together which was the main thing I wanted from an email client. But the dark mode is the worst of any of the half dozen or so email clients I’ve been experimenting with as part of a New Years resolution to get myself together when it comes to email. I didn’t realize how important dark mode was to me until I saw the results of how much battery it saves and now I think it might be a deal breaker for SparkMailAI. I see most emails coming through as awkward bright white blocks against a dark background (not just newsletters, pretty much every single email I get which is just some plain text and a signature) and even when that doesn’t happen, black text almost never turns white against the dark background. It’s making dark mode difficult/awkward and the black mode practically unusable. I hope this gets better.

by Bitchen!

I really like Spark. In particular, the smart Inbox feature is amazing. You can review your mail and then pin anything that is important to go back to later. This creates a good buffer system for items requiring additional action while letting you clean out your inbox quickly and effectively. Additionally, it identifies newsletters and displays those separately so you can mark them as read 5 at a time.

My only gripe is that it pops up a message on my phone about a new email and then when I go into SparkMailAI to actually read the message it clocks for sometimes a minute or more before displaying.

A suggestion for further improvement would be to add custom or additional selections to “Pin”. For example, it would be great if I could categorize messages as needing a phone call, email, or research. These could be grouped into separate sections, just like pinned items and would prove an easy way to, for example, know who to call first when time permits.