I know it sounds weird, but I actually like email. I still remember when I first started using email in the 90s and the ability to send a letter to anyone, anywhere in a matter of seconds felt like magic. There’s still a residue of that magic for me.
I have also embraced email as way to organize my life. It’s a messaging platform, it’s a to-do list, it’s a reminders app, it’s an archive, it’s a paper trail. Sure, there are plenty of other apps that can be used for these purposes, but there’s something to be said for one-stop shopping, especially if you already live in email all day.
To this end, I have used a lot of different email clients over the years. I believe the first was Netscape Communicator. It looked like this:
I eventually moved on to Yahoo! webmail (accessible from any computer!) and then settled in with Thunderbird (spiritual successor to Netscape Communicator) before the 800-pound gorilla that is Gmail came along. Gmail was way ahead of the curve in 2004, and like many other technologists, I embraced it wholeheartedly. And Gmail has held up pretty well: almost two decades later, it’s the most popular personal email service, and still a perfectly viable product. But a few years back, it started feeling stale to me. I wanted something that felt like as much of a reinvention of email as Gmail did back in 2004. And along came HEY.
HEY genuinely looked and felt like a new kind of email. And it featured some major functional workflow changes. The thing is, these weren’t new options. It was HEY’s way or the highway. I wasn’t sure about all of these changes, but I like to experiment by doing, so I plunked down my $99 and committed to HEY as my everyday email. Two years later, I have found a lot to like with HEY, but persistent annoyances remain as well. So I recently started casting about for a new email client, and I reeled one in that I believe combines the best of HEY with the best of Gmail. Let’s Spark it up.
Spark is an email client made by Readdle, a Ukrainian productivity software company. I’m going to run down what I like about it relative to HEY and Gmail.
Screener/Gatekeeper. One of HEY’s front and center features is the Screener. Anytime you get an email from an address that’s never emailed you before, it doesn't go to your inbox. Instead it goes to a holding area until you choose whether you want to receive emails from that sender. Of course, you can block emails in Gmail, but as a matter of workflow, it’s nice to be forced to make that decision at the outset, so crap emails don’t start building up in the first place. Spark essentially replicates this functionality with Gatekeeper. I like Spark’s implementation a little better, because it’s easier to preview the emails when making your decision. Also, Screener is too blunt an instrument at times, because some senders use one generic email address for all kinds of different purposes. For example, noreply@yourbank.com might send some things you want to see (low balance notifications) but other things don’t (marketing offers). With HEY, there is no way to differentiate if the sending address iss the same. You either screen it in or out. Gatekeeper isn’t different per se, but there’s way to solve this problem in Spark (more below).
Gmail History & Sync. You can forward emails sent to your Gmail account to HEY, but there is no way to import your history. There is something to be said for a fresh start, but occasionally I’d have to pop over to Gmail to look for an old email. You can use Spark with most email services, but if you are coming from Gmail, you can just login with your Google credentials and your entire Gmail history appears instantly in Spark. Furthermore, Spark stays in sync with your Gmail. In other words, if you mark as read, delete, archive, etc in Spark, it is marked as read, deleted, archived, etc in Gmail too. This is nice because it makes going back to Gmail relatively seamless, if necessary.
Filters. HEY has very crude filters. Everything is filtered to one of three places, depending on the choice you made with the Screener: Inbox, Newsletters, or Paper Trail (for receipts and other unimportant notifications). This actually worked pretty well for me, but there were definitely times when I wanted more granularity. Bizarrely, Spark doesn't have filters at all, but because it’s synced with Gmail, all your existing Gmail filters work, and if you need a new filter, you can just create it in Gmail. It would be nice if this was a native function (maybe a future update?), but it’s an easy enough workaround.
Search. This is perhaps HEY’s Achilles heel. The search function just plain sucks. I often slogged through multiple failed searches before giving up and flipping back to Gmail where I found the email I was looking for within three seconds of my first search. Spark supports Gmail search operators and if anything seems even faster than Gmail at returning accurate results.
Bundles. One of the nice things about HEY’s simple filters & Screener combo, is that it does a good job of keeping you focused on the important emails, and keeps Newsletter & Paper Trail out of sight and out of mind. There is literally no concept of an unread message in Paper Trail—if it goes there it is automatically read. I was uneasy about this at first, and worried I’d end up ignoring the Paper Trail and stuff would slip through the cracks. And I was right. After a while, I barely looked at Paper Trail at all, like maybe once a month. And it was fine! I think I missed two or three emails that caused minor inconveniences in two years of HEY usage. I really came to appreciate this focused workflow. Fortunately, Spark mostly replicates it. You don’t make the decision at the Gatekeeper, but rather Spark’s “Smart Inbox” guesses when things are Newsletters or Notifications and bundles them all up accordingly. Of course, sometimes it guesses wrong, but you can quickly change the category (both retroactively and going forward) with a right click. These bundles aren’t quite as out of sight as with HEY, because they appear at the top of your Inbox (if there are any unarchived emails in them), but they are still out of the way, and you are less likely to have an important email slip by.
Sweep. One of the email clients I didn’t mention above when covering my history was Google Inbox. This was a short-lived experiment by Google that effectively acted as a skin for Gmail, but it had some neat features, and one of my favorites was the ability to “Sweep” bundles. Inbox would let you look over a bundle of similar emails (i.e. notifications), all at once, and since typically you could just look at the subject lines and see there was nothing of importance, you could then click the “Sweep” button which would instantly archive everything in the bundle, effectively sweeping it away. Spark has a similar function, where you mark everything in bundle as “done” (the Spark equivalent of archiving) with a single click.
Imbox. No, that’s not a typo. Maddeningly, HEY renamed their Inbox to Imbox (for Important Box). I get it, HEY, you’re trying to be different and cute, but I never got used to it, and my mind always read it as a misspelling. This is a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. Thankfully, Spark doesn’t use any alternate spellings.
Inbox Zero. HEY explicitly rejects the Inbox Zero philosophy. In HEY’s inbox (that’s right, I refuse to use their spelling), there is the New stuff and the Previously Seen stuff. If it is Previously Seen, it just piles up towards the bottom of the screen, and you can scroll back through it forever. The idea is to not worry about chasing Inbox Zero with constant archiving or filing, and to just let the Previously Seen stuff flow away like an endless river. I appreciate the zen of it all but…damnit, I like a clean inbox! HEY always has a list of emails on the screen, even if you have dealt with everything. They eventually added a Cover Page feature that can slide a picture up to hide your unsightly email list, but I still know they are under there! Also, if you read an email, but don’t have a chance to reply to or otherwise act on it yet, it can easily get lost in the Previously Seen shuffle. I think HEY’s idea is that you should either use the Set Aside or Reply Later functions if further action is required, but that isn't always convenient when reading emails on the go. More on those functions below.
Set Aside & Reply Later. As mentioned above, if a read email requires action, but you don’t act on it immediately, HEY seems to assume you will put it in Set Aside or Reply Later. Set Aside is used for emails you expect to reference in the near future (for example, boarding passes or travel reservations), and Reply Later is self-explanatory. I liked these functions, but I didn’t want to always use them, and they took up an irritatingly large amount of screen real estate in HEY. Spark has Set Aside which works almost identically, but it takes up much less space. There is no Reply Later function, but I’m actually using Set Aside for that, since it’s nice to have reminder of emails to which you need to respond on screen. As for things that actually need to be “set aside” for reference, I’m using Pins which are the equivalent of Gmail’s Stars (and, in fact, sync with Gmail’s Stars), then archiving the Pinned item. Pins are accessible in the sidebar (a permanent folder).
Snooze & Reminders vs. Bubble Up. Google Inbox introduced a Snooze function, which was so incredibly useful they eventually ported it over to Gmail. HEY didn’t have this at launch, but eventually introduced Bubble Up, which was functional, but I didn’t like that once something “bubbled up” it stayed at the top of your inbox regardless of whether you had clicked on it or even responded to it, until you “popped” the bubble. Spark’s Snooze works just like Gmail’s, except Spark also has a Reminder feature. Reminder is, more or less, the same as Snooze, except you add it to an email that you are composing rather than an email you have received. For instance, an email you want to make sure you follow up on if you don’t receive a reply by a given date. You could effectively do this in Gmail with Snooze, but you’d have to wait until you sent the email, then go into Sent and execute the Snooze, so it’s nice to have the option available in less steps.
Attachments. I appreciate HEY’s willingness to innovate, but sometimes they seem to do things differently just for the sake of doing things differently. For example, when you add an attachment, it inserts the attachment in-line, wherever the cursor happens to be. I’m not talking about a picture that you might conceivably want to be in-line, but any kind of attachment, .pdf, .zip, etc. This has a tendency to break up your text formatting for no apparent purpose. And when you click on attachments, the preview covers the entire screen in the same window, preventing you from referring back to the text of the email unless you close the preview. In Spark, attachments work in the normal way I have come to expect (attached at the bottom, preview opens in a new window), and for me, this is a clear case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Desktop Client vs. Webmail. There’s something delightfully old-school about using Spark’s dedicated desktop client for email. But it also just feels snappier and more responsive than webmail, even though both Gmail and HEY are quite good in that regard. Also, while I am only using it for a single Gmail account, you can easily manage multiple accounts in a unified interface with the client. The big advantage of webmail is that you can check it from any computer, whereas a client is limited to the personal devices where you have it installed. This would be a significant downside to using Spark, except that since it stays syncs with Gmail, you can always just log in to Gmail on the web if you find yourself away from your personal devices. Spark also has the obligatory mobile apps (iOS & Android) that do a good job of replicating the experience on mobile form factors.
Notifications. Another HEY philosophical decision is to have notifications turned off by default. No unread badges or anything. The idea is to avoid having email interrupt your life so much, and to allow you to check it on your own terms. I thought this would bother me, but in practice, I came to appreciate it so much that I completely turned off notifications in Spark as well. I couldn’t get away with that for work email, but for personal mail, there really isn’t anything that pressing.
Blocking Spies. By default, HEY blocks spy pixels and other ways that marketers can track you when you open their emails. Spark has an option to block remote images from loading, which I believe accomplishes much of the same thing, but it’s more of a brute force technique than HEY’s surgical approach and does make image filled emails look ugly. Furthermore, while Spark is a paid service just like HEY, and so they won’t scan your emails or serve you ads, if you are using it in conjunction with Gmail then your stuff is still visible to Google’s email scans. For most people, I don’t think this stuff is a big deal (it’s not for me), but if you are real gung ho about privacy, HEY is probably the best option from that standpoint.
Keyboard Shortcuts. HEY, Gmail, and Spark all have a good set of keyboard shortcuts, but with Spark you can customize them, which is a nice option.
Various HEY Features. HEY has a lot of interesting features that I don’t believe are replicated anywhere else. For example, HEY allows you to rename threads to something that makes sense to you, and to merge multiple threads about the same topic into one. They also allow you to attach “sticky notes” to emails, organize emails into a kanban-style “workflow”, turn emails directly into blog posts (HEY World), etc. I thought these were cool ideas when I signed up for HEY (and I still do), but in actual practice…I haven’t used them at all. I’m not sure why. Maybe I forget these features exist, maybe they aren’t a good fit for my personal email needs, but in any case, since I haven’t used them in two years, I doubt I’ll miss them.
Share Email Via Link. Another cool HEY feature that I haven’t used is the ability to share an email thread with anyone via link. And while I haven’t used it yet, I can see how that would come in handy. Fortunately, Spark supports the feature too, so maybe I’ll try it one of these days .
+ai. Spark’s newest feature, which I have to assume is using ChatGPT’s api, is +ai. As you might guess, it generates email text for you based on a prompt. I don’t know how useful this will be for me, since a) I actually enjoy writing, and b) if something is generic enough for an AI to write, I probably don’t need to send an email in the first place, but it will be fun to play with.
If Spark sounds intriguing, you can install it and try out most of the experience for free. However, a few key features, like Gatekeeper, require the Premium version for $60/yr. Of course, if you use email like I do, $60/yr is well worth it.