Anyone?
I have been using the free version of Spark for about 2 years. Works well. I see they are running a BF sale right now. The thing I think I’m most curious about is templates although I am also curious about the AI features.
I tried it earlier this year, and liked it, a lot, but then I got a refund.
Why? It’s was painfully slow to check and download emails on iPad and iOS. That may have been because I have three Google acounts and it was downloading them sequentially, I don’t know. It was frustrating, but it annoyed me so much I switched to mimestream on the Mac (very fast) and outlook on the iPhone and iPad.
Another thing I didn’t care for: the renaming of the various folders to things like “done”, which I think was clever but utterly pointless and self indulgent.
What did I like a lot? It looked nice. The ai responses were helpful. It was great on Mac.
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I have about 20 accounts hooked up to Spark…I just use the free version. My only irritation with Spark is that every few months or so, one of the accounts want me to login again
Out of the blue, I just noticed that Spark is on Setapp. Caught me completely out of the blue. But it is getting tons of bad reviews there. Granted, I could try it but people seem to despise the UX.
I just loaded the premium version from Setapp since I can still use the old version. Wow, what a huge difference. I can see how this version can get people all worked up. I will try to give it more time. The one good thing is that I watched a video on it from SCO and I found out that the free version has templates (but just 5). But that is all I need and that is a big deal to me.
I’ve been using Spark for years. On iOS/iPadOS, it’s great. The old v2 on the Mac was also great. The new v3 (the one that launched on Setapp) is Electron-based, slow, it’s a memory hog and it’s nearly unusable if you’re used to v2. It requires way more clicks to do same stuff, it does not provide as convenient overview of one’s mailbox as v2 did, and due to it being Electron-based, it does not look nor feel native. There’s also no feature parity across different versions.
They do tweak it, but for me the experience is already ruined – with they way Spark currently works on the desktop, mimicking Gmail, I’d rather use the Gmail/Outlook web clients. I have had v3 installed since its launch and could not for the life of me get used to it. Dealing with email is a pain and a chore when I use that version. Sadly, v2 for the Mac is on life support now and it’s unlikely to get any meaningful updates. When v2 gets shut down, I’ll probably just switch to using the web clients or Outlook.
I may have found a dealbreaker for me. At first, I couldn’t extend the sidebar to show me the account labels. It took me a long time to figure it out which should not be the case. But I’ll take a little blame for that.
But, one thing that I noticed and wondering if it can be changed is when starting a new email, the popup window stays part of the interface. In v2, I could move it anywhere and even minimize the whole app. Similarly, when I open up Settings, it sits on top of the app. I can’t move it around. Maybe it’s the way I work but this is annoying.
But I seem to have templates free v2 so that’s worth all this research!
I cringe to think when the day will come when I have to leave Spark. I loved Airmail and then after a few years, started having issues that I couldn’t overcome and moved to Spark which I really enjoy. Moving clients especially if you connect to other apps (e.g. Omnifocus) sucks as those links then break.