For several years Airmail dominated all other mail clients on the Mac. There weren’t even many questions about other customers. If you don’t like Mac’s Mail.app, you probably went to the App Store, paid $10 and downloaded Airmail because it does mail so much better.
But Airmail is undeniably not on top anymore. I’ve been a long time fan of Spark for iPhone and iPad for managing my mail and resetting my inbox every day. A few months ago Readdle released a version of Spark for Mac. Like its iOS counterparts, Spark is completely free, even on Mac. It has been quite popular on the App Store since its release. So how does this free app get to the $10 dominant champion Airmail 3?
Design and Customization
Airmail and Spark have thoughtful designs that respect the macOS Sierra aesthetic. They’re also both highly customizable. Although Spark lets you customize swipe gestures, Smart Inbox, signatures, keyboard shortcuts, folders, snooze times and much more, Airmail still tops the list in this category.
You can turn Airmail into almost anything you want.
You can turn Airmail into almost anything you want. Hide or show sidebars or parts of them, tweak menu bar shortcuts, organize folders and snoozes, change the whole look with a variety of themes… the possibilities are incredible. I can’t think of anything about Airmail that I would want to change that I wouldn’t be able to do anyway from Preferences.
Airmail even integrates with a few third-party apps. Connect services like Wunderlist, Droplr, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and more to see related tasks in your menus. Connecting Droplr automatically uploads your file attachments to the cloud, or connecting Wunderlist lets you quickly save messages to to-do lists.
Spark manages to have a clean and sophisticated design. It perfectly balances the features you need, with a smart inbox and its own prioritization for tools that enhance it. Airmail is an application for the most demanding. The level of customization is unmatched and the features you can enable turn it from a regular email client into a productivity machine.
Features to Combat Email Overload
Spark was designed from the ground up to handle the email overload.
The biggest problem with email today is that most people receive too many emails per day. Mail clients need to manage mail and reduce clutter, but most still don’t do a good job.
Spark was built from the ground up to tackle email overload and take users to that magical place known as inbox zero: the clean, new inbox. Spark uses Smart Inbox to organize emails by type. New messages are divided into three categories. Personal ones are shown at the top from regular users like you and me, notifications are below from various services and below them are newsletters. Spark categorizes all remaining emails together at the bottom. In addition, Spark has optional smart notifications, which only inform you about personal things and let you see the rest later.
You can archive or mark as read all emails in a particular category with one click. If you don’t want to deal with newsletters today, tick them off and move on. Other useful tools are fix and snooze. Pinning an email keeps it fresh and stable in your inbox, even if you’ve moved it to the archive until you decide to get rid of it. Snooze temporarily removes an email and then brings it back to your inbox as a reminder at the date and time you specify.
Spark and Airmail both have swipe gestures for quick action on an email. They are customizable, but Spark has twice the options per swipe. For example, in Spark, a swipe from the left gives me the option to archive or delete an email, while Airmail only lets me archive it. Both apps have robust and powerful search with lots of optimization options. Spark excels because it lets you write in natural language. I can search for “emails with JPG attachments” and instantly get every email with a JPG file. Airmail is not that smart.
Airmail has a unique productivity feature. It creates special folders on top of what you already need to help the organization. In a way, they look like tags: To Do, Memo, and Done. This feature seems a little redundant to me. Folders and tags are already present above them, as in Snooze.
Still, the Spark is the clear winner in beating an overwhelming inbox. This is what needs to be done so beautifully and efficiently. Airmail has so many customization options, folders and app integrations all over the place, all of which adds to the clutter. Not beautiful.
Email Creation
There isn’t much to talk about the email creation experience in Spark or Airmail. Compose windows can only change so much.
Airmail has two pro features that I love: reminders and send later. You can add a reminder to a draft to send it or finish it at a specific time. Better still, complete the entire email and choose a later date and time for it to be sent automatically if you want. I don’t think these are features that most people use regularly, but it’s nice to have on hand.
One advantage Spark has over Airmail is fast responses.
Airmail also has important formatting advantages: being able to write your email in Markdown or HTML. Especially HTML is useful if you send newsletters because you can compose a professional, graphical letter within Airmail. The spark is brand new so I’ll loosen it up a bit, but hopefully that will come with time.
One advantage Spark has over Airmail is fast responses. Think of these as Facebook responses for emails. Instead of replying to an email just to write a quick statement, you can use a quick reply to get this done for you. The defaults are thank you, smile, great idea, call me, cool, love and accept, but you can also set your own. Quick replies appear as a smart reply option to personal human senders, not automated newsletters. You can find the button at the bottom of a compatible email.
Winner Mail Client
If both apps were free, I would give Airmail an edge because of the sheer number of features.
I hate to say this, but I have no choice: it’s a draw. But don’t worry, it should be pretty easy to crack depending on what you want in a mail client.
If you need perfection to get rid of the clutter, organize your emails, and ultimately spend as little time as possible on email, get Spark. I’ve used many mail apps and none have dealt with email overload like Spark. If you need a client that lets you do just about anything with your mail, integrates with other apps and services, and wants to deal with the clutter in your inbox, go with Airmail.
If both apps were free, I would give Airmail an edge because of the sheer number of features. But Airmail is $9.99 while Spark is free. While the value for money in Spark is huge, the value in Airmail is definitely justified by its targeted user base.
