Spark the best [update: a good] email client for BOTH macOS & iOS

[bwintx]

Sorry, haven't read entire thread, but I've answered Wreckus's comment Spark has been updated, so maybe it's time to try it...or not

Apparently, it still has a bug causing it to miss some IMAP emails.
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Edison is the one I use now alongside Apple Mail. I do all email business in Apple Mail but I have Edison installed so that I get push notifications for everything. I'm probably going to move full-time to Edison eventually, because it's pretty damn nice every time I open it. I'd need to wait for the (in-progress) Mac client first before I'd be willing to break the working Apple Mail+Apple Mail combo I have going right now. I'm not in this life just to switch email clients every six months, hehe.

Trying this approach now -- Edison for push (non-Gsuite Gmail is my only one needed) and Apple iOS mail for the rest.

 

[SteveJobzniak]

https://sparkmailapp.com/changelog <-- I check this sometimes (but less and less frequently, since I doubt Spark's competence). No mentions of IMAP yet.
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Apparently, it still has a bug causing it to miss some IMAP emails.

Yep, I found my latest post: Sept 2nd: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...r-both-macos-ios.2013631/page-5#post-24957946 (has screenshot showing that Spark still has its lovely "missing emails on IMAP" situation, at least in whatever version was the latest as of Sept 2nd 2017.. according to my post it was 1.4.0).

Trying this approach now -- Edison for push (non-Gsuite Gmail is my only one needed) and Apple iOS mail for the rest.

Good. I also use Edison's Notification Filters (in settings) and manually dump in emails I don't want to be notified about. I don't know if there's an easier process that I haven't found... but I basically: Get a notification, see that I don't like notifications about that sender, tap its name, hold to copy the email address, then go into Edison's Settings and paste their exact email manually into Notification Filters.

It doesn't seem to have any instant "block notifications with 1 tap". I looked around but found no other way than what I am doing.

 

[bwintx]

Good. I also use Edison's Notification Filters (in settings) and manually dump in emails I don't want to be notified about. I don't know if there's an easier process that I haven't found... but I basically: Get a notification, see that I don't like notifications about that sender, tap its name, hold to copy the email address, then go into Edison's Settings and paste their exact email manually into Notification Filters.

It doesn't seem to have any instant "block notifications with 1 tap". I looked around but found no other way than what I am doing.

Only drawback I've found was, you might say, a self-inflicted wound. I had left the native iOS Mail app set to fetch more aggressively which, of course, was sucking battery juice big-time. Changed it to fetch only every 15 minutes. I am tempted to set it to Manual, considering that I went ahead and added all my accounts (GMail, Exchange, etc.) to Edison Email, but am hoping the 15-minute setting will be sufficient to stop the draining behavior.

 

[SteveJobzniak]

@bwintx Oh, yeah with push there's no need to drain down the emails so frequently.

Anyway, at the rate Edison is going, I can imagine that their Mac client will be really clean. Will be fun to see what happens! They seem to be working hard on building it for Mac right now.

 

[MacGizmo]

I can't see how anyone can recommend this app for any reason other than it's free. This app is lacking in so many areas I don't even know where to start.

 

[bwintx]

Decided the combo of Mail and Email was a bit too much for the old battery (even after I switched Mail to fetch only every 15 minutes), so am back to just Airmail on iOS for now. (Sigh.) But keep plugging, Edison: give us an Email app that does threading for non-Gmail accounts and works the same in that Mac version you're apparently working on furiously, and that may be the Holy Grail. For now.

 

[SteveJobzniak]

@bwintx Did you check in Settings - Battery? It shows usage plus background activity. I doubt your email apps used any battery, actually. Push in Edison requires zero battery (it sits on the same Apple notifications connection shared by all apps). Fetch in Apple Mail requires some battery but I doubt that it is much.

 

[bwintx]

@bwintx Did you check in Settings - Battery? It shows usage plus background activity. I doubt your email apps used any battery, actually. Push in Edison requires zero battery (it sits on the same Apple notifications connection shared by all apps). Fetch in Apple Mail requires some battery but I doubt that it is much.

Yes, actually, that's why I did it, because of what Settings > Battery indicated. You're right that Edison wasn't the cause — it's amazingly light on the battery for what it does — but, for some reason I haven't yet determined, Mail was sucking down battery juice big-time despite not having that much apparent activity. So, since I already use Airmail on Mac anyway and it actually seems to handle my workplace's Exchange stuff, especially conversations, better than Mail for some reason, I just decided to go back to Airmail for iOS for the time being. It's definitely not perfect, but it's kinda grown on me. Of course, I'll probably switch back and forth as the mood strikes me, I find some article that makes me re-re-re-think it, etc. Oh, for that aforementioned Holy Grail...

 

[SteveJobzniak]

@bwintx Yeah we are all chasing the Holy Grail email app here, hehe. I wish there was one. :\ When Spark came out for Mac I thought the search was over, but instead I discovered all of its ugly issues (see list here: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ent-for-both-macos-ios.2013631/#post-24008159).

As for Airmail, the reason I never gave it a chance was all the dissatisfied users talking about all of its bugs on Twitter.

About the battery issue: When you say Mail was sucking down battery, you mean Apple Mail? I've always heard that its fetch is a battery hog... hmm. Can fetch be turned off and relying completely on Edison's push instead? That way Apple Mail will fetch emails when you open the app instead of constantly.

 

[bwintx]

About the battery issue: When you say Mail was sucking down battery, you mean Apple Mail? I've always heard that its fetch is a battery hog... hmm. Can fetch be turned off and relying completely on Edison's push instead? That way Apple Mail will fetch emails when you open the app instead of constantly.

Yes, Apple Mail. I think (although memory may fail me) that I did, in fact, try it with purely Manual fetch (thus, off, basically), but I can give it another try and see what happens.

LATER EDIT:
I tried it for a while and finally decided I didn't want the hassle, partly due to a particular situation with my workplace's Exchange account that seems not to work well with Mail. I'll just stick with Airmail for a while.

 

[martint235]

Don’t know if this has been mentioned previously but Edison does allow one touch disabling of notifications from a sender on the watch.

I currently have an issue where some emails show as having no content. Edison have been up front and said they don’t know why but they are working on it as they can replicate the issue

 

[bwintx]

Well, since it's football season here in North America, I decided to do a good ol' end run.

I realized that, in the final analysis, what I really wanted was simply for all my email, from all my accounts, to work well with the Apple clients on macOS and iOS; and then I further realized that a lot of my aggravation with email and those clients would go away if I simply bit the bullet and made Gmail cease to be the elephant in the room, since its non-standard ways and anti-Apple practices were causing most of my problems in this regard.

So, after some research into how others had done it, I got my own domain plus an account with FastMail to host it for email, and then migrated all 12 years' worth of Gmail content (and set Gmail to forward any subsequent emails) to the new place.

Of course, this had its own upfront pain to handle. I had to notify quite a few vendors, friends, et al.; I'll have to rebuild a lot of rules for automatically moving some emails to folders (real IMAP folders, not the Gmail bastardizations thereof); and I'm still also keeping the Gmail account live partly because I want to make sure I haven't forgotten anybody and partly so Google won't shut it down, because that does happen and then you can't ever get the old account name back.

...BUT FastMail comes highly recommended, costs only about 14 cents a day (plus about 4 cents a day for the domain, at least where I bought the domain), and is far more standards-compliant than Gmail, which means it works a lot better with Apple's clients including, yep, providing absolutely normal push. Stuff comes through almost instantaneously. And, best of all, if I ever decide that the Apple clients aren't what I want to use, the standards-compliance of my new setup should make it highly portable.

I will be the first to admit that such a move ain't for everyone, but that's my current version of the "holy grail": rather than gripe because the car bounces on the hole-filled road, I decided to drive it on a smoother road. And, so far, I'm enjoying the ride quite a bit.

 

[mailbuoy]

Well, since it's football season here in North America, I decided to do a good ol' end run.

I realized that, in the final analysis, what I really wanted was simply for all my email, from all my accounts, to work well with the Apple clients on macOS and iOS; and then I further realized that a lot of my aggravation with email and those clients would go away if I simply bit the bullet and made Gmail cease to be the elephant in the room, since its non-standard ways and anti-Apple practices were causing most of my problems in this regard.

So, after some research into how others had done it, I got my own domain plus an account with FastMail to host it for email, and then migrated all 12 years' worth of Gmail content (and set Gmail to forward any subsequent emails) to the new place.

Of course, this had its own upfront pain to handle. I had to notify quite a few vendors, friends, etc.; I'll have to rebuild a lot of rules for automatically moving some emails to folders (real IMAP folders, not the Gmail bastardizations thereof); and I'm still also keeping the Gmail account live partly because I want to make sure I haven't forgotten anybody and partly so Google won't shut it down, because that does happen and then you can't ever get the old account name back.

...BUT FastMail comes highly recommended, costs only about 14 cents a day (plus about 4 cents a day for the domain, at least where I bought the domain), and is far more standards-compliant than Gmail, which means it works a lot better with Apple's clients including, yep, providing absolutely normal push. Stuff comes through almost instantaneously. And, best of all, if I ever decide that the Apple clients aren't what I want to use, the standards-compliance of my new setup should make it highly portable.

I will be the first to admit that such a move ain't for everyone, but that's my current version of the "holy grail": rather than gripe because the car bounces on the hole-filled road, I decided to drive it on a smoother road. And, so far, I'm enjoying the ride quite a bit.

Why didn't you use iCloud or Yahoo instead of Google - instead of setting up your own domain and hosting it on FastMail?

 

[bwintx]

Why didn't you use iCloud or Yahoo instead of Google - instead of setting up your own domain and hosting it on FastMail?

I use iCloud, too, but had decided on the own-domain approach and it doesn't allow that. There are occasional reports about iCloud performance issues, too, but I don't know how much reliability to ascribe to those reports. Still, if they're valid, they would be enough reason not to make iCloud my most heavily used personal account.

As for Yahoo, I wasn't crazy about them even before they were bought by Verizon, which made the decision to kill its own email setup for business reasons and, I suspect, will eventually do it for Yahoo as well unless the ad revenue from it is a lot larger than I believe it to be. I don't know whether they allow domain-based email since I never seriously considered Yahoo.

 

[SteveJobzniak]

@bwintx Wow, FastMail's servers implement true Apple push (zero battery):

https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-available-in-ios-mail/

https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-push/

Happy for you that you found this! It even makes me consider it...

 

[bwintx]

@bwintx Wow, FastMail's servers implement true Apple push (zero battery):

https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-available-in-ios-mail/

https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-push/

Happy for you that you found this! It even makes me consider it...

Yeah. So far, so good, except am still tinkering with settings to minimize battery suck on the iPhone. Perhaps iOS 11.1, supposedly coming this week, will resolve that to some extent, based on what I'm reading.

 

[Wreckus]

Sorry for the late reply..actually forgot about it.

I did a few things and everything is working now.

a) fully converted to an @outlook.com email address
b) set up account in spark as an exchange email address and using my outlook.com email address.

All my folders shows up and emails are pushed to my devices.

 

[bwintx]

One additional note re the battery drain issues while I wait for what supposedly will be a much better situation in iOS 11.1: I did the whole "drain-your-iPhone-battery-down-to-[almost]-zero-to-calibrate-it" thing, and the drain appears to have become much less of a problem. YMMV.

(And still loving my aforementioned personal "holy grail." )

 

[bwintx]

Yeah. So far, so good, except am still tinkering with settings to minimize battery suck on the iPhone. Perhaps iOS 11.1, supposedly coming this week, will resolve that to some extent, based on what I'm reading.

Just a quick additional note, since I realize I left that hanging: my iPhone 7 Plus in general is a very happy camper, battery-wise, with iOS 11.1, including with Mail getting all that push goodness from FastMail as well as my other accounts which do iOS-savvy push. Just like in the good ol' 10.3.3 days.

 

[lpoolrob]

Does anyone have problems with Fastmail (IMAP) and Spark?

It doesn't push - so I get no notifications. Applies to both iOS and Mac versions. Notifications are enabled for Spark on the devices and for the purposes of testing, set to all mail as opposed to Smart Inbox.

 

[bwintx]

Does anyone have problems with Fastmail (IMAP) and Spark?

It doesn't push - so I get no notifications. Applies to both iOS and Mac versions. Notifications are enabled for Spark on the devices and for the purposes of testing, set to all mail as opposed to Smart Inbox.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but just to clarify: You did set up an app-specific password for Spark in FastMail, correct?

 

[lpoolrob]

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but just to clarify: You did set up an app-specific password for Spark in FastMail, correct?

Yes - no problems sending or receiving but no push and therefore no notifications.

 

[bwintx]

Yes - no problems sending or receiving but no push and therefore no notifications.

Any help from this?
https://helpspot.readdle.com/spark/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=1044

 

[lpoolrob]

Any help from this?
https://helpspot.readdle.com/spark/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=1044

Nope. All the settings are good.

Trying to see if it works for anyone else?

 

[bwintx]

Nope. All the settings are good.

Trying to see if it works for anyone else?

Another couple of things you could try to get at least a little more info that might help you:
(1.) Add the FM account to Accounts and Passwords and see whether you can get notifications in the stock Mail app.
(2.) Download the FastMail client, which, obviously, should have no trouble with it.

If you can get FastMail notifications with one or both of those methods, but not with Spark, you'll at least know it's a Spark issue rather than a FastMail issue. I think.