I am recanting my first reaction to Spark 3. Users are often quite emotionally attached to their ways and features, and often times the first reaction isn't always the most well-considered response.
Although it seems that Spark may have overly inspired itself in the workflows offered by Basecamp's HEY app, upon studying it a bit more, it is a welcoming progression from V2.
I guess the main issue was they way that the subscription model was introduced into a drastically different experience that did not include previously owned features. That's what sparked (no pun intended) the reactive fire from most users.
I cannot say I dislike the direction the team is going with an Electron-based app and its offer for focus, shortcutting and processing velocity. These are all great ambitions to be aspired (although that bundled notifications line away from the top of the screen is a UX heinous crime).
We as users may sometimes forget to praise changes, more so from where they are trying to get to instead of the first steps towards that are often meddled by obstacles.
Definitely not a perfect release. Promising though. More importantly, it still comes from a group of people who listen and legitimately care about solving users issues.
We should all get behind and encourage that; specially counting how much of the features can be used for free.
Keep at it. Fix these smaller hiccups.
You're great, and I am still applauding.
Problems with crashes in Windows client. It is impossible to use.
User friendly interface and like the AI under the bonnet. I will continue to use as a client for iOS device but will look for another solution for Desktop.
A really long-time user of Spark. Unfortunately I was unable to use the new spark because it was super slow and the experience was confusing. I had to delete it from my phone and revert back to Spark 2 on my Mac.
Hello! We’re sorry to hear about your experience with the new version. We've worked hard to fix all known slowness issues and optimize the overall experience, and deliver the top requested features by our existing old users of Spark 2, to Spark Desktop. We'd love for you to give it another try and see the improvements. Your feedback is really important to us!
Spark was great until v3 took away their attention from fixing bugs in v2 and killed the third column in v3. Because of the lack of 3 columns, it is pretty much unusable on a tablet or laptop.
Sparks support team has always been a, “that’s great; we’ll tell our product manager” and then nothing happens. This seems to be happening with the third column, which is disappointing.
I switched to Canary mail, which has its own set of issues as they try to throw AI at everything, but if you turn all that off and customize the toolbar a bit, you get what Spark was with 3 columns.
Hi Brad, thank you for the feedback. We are currently working on the 3-column view, and we hope to launch it in the end of February - hope you can come back to take a look once it's done. If you wish - we can even share with you some work-in-progress mockups to get your feedback on them (but I think we might release it to the beta soon so you can test it live)
Hi Brad! I was responding to some other reviews here and wanted to let you know that the 3-column view has been available on Spark Desktop for some time now, along with the remaining key 'feature parity' features requested by our long-time Spark 2 users. If you're up for giving it another try, we'd be glad to have you back!
I was coming back to Spark after a 1 year break and I am underwhelmed by the redesign. All the things I like (sidebar menu, the swipes) are gone. It looks like Gmail now. I don't see a reason to use it anymore.
I have been using Spark for over 6 years, in my opinion it is the best email client for teams and individuals. I have tried many other email apps including Outlook, gmail, Airmail, Apple mail, Thunderbird, Polymail and Edison mail. Spark is unique in the way it categorizes emails into email groups, such as newsletters and notifications, and a grouping for priority senders. They recently added a gatekeeper which can block spam domains and they never get to you inbox. An now Spark has an AI feature which can modify your writing in strong or soft ways of your choosing. When I first started with Spark there was a banner when you opened it "Love your email again" and I can say I still love it after all these years. 💛🇺🇦💙
Disappointed in opinionated UX choices and Hey-style changes that attempt to reinvent my email workflow. I gave it a try for a few weeks but went back to Spark 2.
Email doesn't need to be solved in such a manner. The best email client is the one that lets me quickly triage, respond and defer messages in a versatile enough way that respects the individual user workflows that have been ingrained for years—if not decades.
The only reason I rated it 2 stars instead of 1 is that after the negative feedback and reviews started to roll in they reversed course to keep the older, better app version available and functioning while they worked to restore features that were missing and resolve subscription-based bugs that should have never shipped in the first place.
Once I'm forced to leave Spark 2 I'll be moving to Apple Mail or another 3rd party email client. And I'll be disappointed because none of those are as nice as Spark 2, yet all of them (including Hey) are better than this newest iteration.
