Spark for Mac gains labels, better folder management, smarter search & more

Prolific Ukrainian developer Readdle today pushed a major update to its award-winning macOS email client, Spark, bringing new features such as labels, improved folder management, smart filters the ability to save emails in Drafts manually and other improvements that will make you love email again.

As I wrote before, Spark is (in my personal opinion) hands down the best email client I’ve used on my Mac. Spark 1.2 for macOS is available at no charge from Mac App Store.

The app is also available for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

If you like to organize your inbox and manage emails using advanced filters, more powerful shortcuts, recents, favorites, labels and folders, Spark 1.2 for macOS is what you need. It’s the biggest update to Spark since its inception more than a year ago.

Here’s everything new in Spark 1.2 for Mac.

Introducing labels

“We know how powerful labels can be while managing a busy or shared inbox and believe we’ve finally found the best solution,” wrote developers. To use labels in your Spark workflow, you must first enable the new Show Labels in List option in the app’s preferences.

Spark 1.2 lets you create new email labels with ease or use your existing Gmail ones. A new Color Tags feature, shown above, provides additional context to custom tags you apply to individual messages.

Improved folder management

Spark has always allowed you to file emails into folders. With reinvented folder management in Spark 1.2, you can put your inbox in order more easily than ever before by cherry-picking the folders to be displayed in the app’s tweaked sidebar.

You can also now reorder folders with drag and drop.

As part of the update, you can use Color Tags, Recents, Favorites and Smart Folders with natural language filters (i.e. “Emails from Seb with PDF files”) to manage your folders and emails.

Tidbits: counter badge for folders, better smart search & more

If you’re using mail rules to sort your emails, you can see how many unread items you have in each folder by enabling the message count badge for folders on the Spark app’s icon in your Dock. To turn this feature on, open Spark’s preferences and go to Message count for other folders → New Emails/All Emails.

Spark’s search feature is smarter than before, with the ability to use operators such as OR and AND to get results from several emails or several folders at the same time. For example, I could type something like “from seb@idownloadblog.com or seb@gmail.com“ to get a list of all emails received from Seb’s business and personal accounts.

Last but not least, you can now save draft emails manually in Spark. Additionally, contacts suggestions in the TO field work much better now and they’ve also redesigned BCC options in Spark’s settings.

Bug fixes

Aside from new features, the team has fixed a bunch of issues:

  • Fixed an issue with old emails not loading
  • Fixed an issue with Japanese characters
  • Fixed the crash while customizing a Touch Bar
  • Fixed the issue with Return button when moving an email
  • Fixed the issue with color coding when ‘None’ is selected
  • Fixed Reply All shortcut issue
  • Fixed UI issue with labels in mail list
  • Fixed rare crashes in Smart Inbox settings
  • Fixed signature appearance issue
  • Fixed email drag and drop behavior
  • Fixed search suggestions issue
  • Fixed crash on message deletion
  • Fixed issues with some HTML emails
  • Fixed Drafts saving
  • The launch speed is now faster than ever
  • Fixed memory consumption and CPU usage issues

“We’ve also got big news to be announced soon,” teased Readdle. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you in the loop so stay tuned to iDownloadBlog for more Spark coverage.

Watch our Spark hands-on video

Wondering why all the fuss?

Be sure to watch my colleague Andrew O’Hara’s hands-on video below.

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Have you used Spark before and if so, how do you like the app? Speaking of which, what’s your favorite email client for macOS? How about your iPhone and iPad? I use Spark across my iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch and couldn’t be happier with it—Spark is all I’ve ever wanted from a cross-platform email app without being a resource hog or inundated with lesser-used features.

Spark for Mac and Spark for iPhone and iPad are available free on App Store.