In the life-long quest for the perfect email client…
Newton has received a very important update today, with dark mode, multi-swipe actions, inline images on desktop, lots of bug fixes (so a big one, not one of those languishing updates the app got when under Essential).
I have gravitated back to it, got a small issue and support was super responsive.
It does it all and WELL (at least as far as I’m concerned: OmniFocus integration, snooze, send later). It’s the only app with Airmail that has such a complete feature set (… and Airmail is, well, buggy as hell).
I’m happy to pay five times Airmail’s price if it means I have an app that works reliably. I have started my free trial but it’s increasingly looking like I’ll be switching.
Definitely. Just my biggest gripe: the task manager integration of Spark is laughable at best. It sends emails to the inbox of the task manager without any possibility to classify the task, forcing you to do double processing. And you cannot access the links to conversations without sending those emails, once again, to your task manager. (You can’t even copy the link you see in the dialog box before sending the task, come on Readdle!) Even Apple Mail readily exposes those links through AppleScript.
I would love to use Spark, but without this, you cannot implement a serious task-based workflow on your email.
(If they were to sort that out, though… I’d probably be sold.)
It looks like they have fixed my biggest gripe with Newton and sharing to a task manager (outside of Todoist) which was it wasn’t including a link back to the mail message. Now it appears to do so.
I wish I could send messages in bulk to my task manager. Also it doesn’t seem like their task management workflow is any more streamlined than Spark when I send it to Things. It just plops it in my Inbox and I still have to adjust the title and sort it, etc…
I will say Conversation View in Newton seems to be a heck of a lot better than Spark though.
Yes, you need an account with them (like Spark does) for snoozing and send later. However, they have published a new privacy policy (it was a promise of the new owners). The account also enables instant syncing of settings (and it’s incredibly fast).
The new owners have fulfilled most of their promises so far, it took them a few months but it’s to be expected since they had to take over the code base.
I’m tentatively excited. There’s still rough edges Airmail doesn’t have but, hey, Newton works…
As for task integration, can’t talk for Things but for OmniFocus, it gives you full control like Airmail and Mail (the only others that do so).
Thank you. But that’s a deal breaker for me. It gives an additional company having access to all of my email accounts. That just another potential point of breath.
I understand, but then FYI that means you can never have snoozing nor send later on anything (unless you use Gmail… where Google has access to your email by design).
@anon85228692 I had thought Airmail achieves snoozing and send-later without an Airmail account, but I could be mistaken.
I’m glad Spark and Airmail have more competition (again).
Sadly, while it does look sleeker, it still doesn’t have quite the sharing capacity Airmail has. While Airmail continues to have some small glitches now and then, custom actions have been delighting me lately.
I don’t understand why email apps are so hesitant to let people put their messages elsewhere. Give us a share sheet in Mail! ;_;
You’re not using an account but you are still giving the app access to your email. The only way to avoid this is to use « privacy mode »
which disables snoozing and send later.
I would so much want Airmail to work well. It remains the best. But the lack of polish and the lack to acknowledgement from the devs that the app needs work is driving me insane. It’s like they don’t use it on daily basis.
So annoying that the ‘Read here’ and ‘Blog’ links are to a generic Medium page… I am not a Medium subscriber so it is not possible to get up to date info.
Interface is smooth as butter. It might not be pretty, but it gets the job done. Lots of promise.
Ran into trouble with the OmniFocus integration: links don’t work cross platform.
Ran into trouble with send later, but at least got error messages warning me (looking at you, Airmail)
Weird character set encoding issues
Reported everything to support which is pretty reactive, and that’s very nice (looking at you again, Airmail)
So we’re in Airmail territory : things work, things don’t.
It drives me absolutely insane that in this day and age there is not a single email app that gets everything right. Spark is this close - if only they replaced their idiotic task manager integration for something that would be actually usable.
So… ended up not using it, even though I really wanted to.
If my research may help someone, my ideal feature set is…
Feature parity between Mac and iOS.
Ability to use any IMAP provider.
Flawless OmniFocus integration (ability to generate tasks from email with deep linking to conversations). Apps doing this: Airmail, Apple Mail (through drag and drop on iPadOS, Dispatch on iOS). Newton fails despite saying otherwise, Spark kinda does but stupidly involves additional filing operations.
Send Later. Apps doing this: Spark, Newton (but ran into trouble), Airmail does not work with aliases (and fails silently, which is terrible), Apple Mail if you add Mailbutler (but that becomes very clunky on iOS since you need a separate app).
Snoozing. You can pretty much integrate that easily with SaneBox, otherwise Airmail, Newton and Spark all work as advertised.
The one with the “less worse” feature set at this point looks like Spark. Here I go again…
Ah I have just done my usual… get frustrated with Spark and then have a search on the App Store. This was one of the few that I was yet to try… might be the steep cost… but I must say I am very impressed…initial reactions are wow… or is that just because its a new shiny app? ARGH - why are we so fickle?!
No save to PDF though… is that correct?
Will I be spending the next 14 days trying not to spend the £50/year?!
