I recently switched back to using Spark mail for Mac and iOS. It was always a toss up between it and Outlook on mobile, but I had decided to stop using it due to privacy concerns. So I tried to settle with Apple’s built-in mail clients but their iOS versions astonishing lack of proper “swipe to delete” made that impossible. Outlook’s Mac UI follows the Office heavy handed approach which make using software a chore.

After the recent server intrusion and the resetting of all passwords related to mail, db, WordPress, and accounts at Pair. I decided to get all our email in order – Mail.app was always finicky about smtp and Apples handling on adding mail accounts is confusing. You can add it in Mail or in control panel, but my experience is that one does not always influence the other.

What prompted the change back was that after finally getting all our email addresses working in Mail, I found out that I would have to repeat this exact same process on each device that I use. Mail login information is not synced across devices.

Spark does sync, but they aren’t Apple which is in part why they elicit concern about privacy.

The Spark UI on Mac is a mess. It’s heavily influenced by mobile interfaces which place major actions where the hand can easily reach them. With a mouse and a large screen we are more concerned with hierarchy – major actions should be at the top on the window. Spark puts them everywhere.

Spam handling is lacklustre, and there is no ability to filter mail or perform certain actions.

I do like the shared templates and delegating of email. That makes it a (very) lightweight CRM, perhaps good enough until we can graduate to a tool like Daylight.

I’ll give it a month to see if I can get used to the UI on Mac.