Spark is designed to get through your email fast. Any read email is quickly punted to the bottom of the list, so if you need to reply to something and don’t have time, make sure you pin the email.

Like Gmail, Spark divides your emails into three categories; People, Notifications and Newsletters. Setting smart notifications to just People will ensure no junk email will make your phone buzz. Spark’s notifications are interactive, so you can quickly send a reply without opening your email, or archive the email with a press.

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Spark’s interface divides these categories in a much cleaner way than Gmail. All email appears in one list, be it from People, Newsletters, Pinned Mail, or Read, so there’s no jumping between tabs.

Spark also supports one of the simplest and best new features of iPadOS; the ability to have two windows of the same app side by side. This makes replying to a long, detailed email easier, as you can have the original email and the compose window on the screen at once. Email templates can be created for common replies — and Spark uses iCloud to make these templates available on all your devices — so you can craft a detailed template on your Mac and send it in seconds on a phone.

But the killer feature for me is the way Spark tackles signing PDFs. Spark will open email to mark up in Readdle’s PDF Expert (which is free for basic editing), and when you’ve scribbled, the PDF is attached to a reply email to the sender. This is such basic, obvious behaviour, but no other email client on iOS behaves that way. Most force you to save the PDF to the Files app, then jump back to the email and reply there, or send a new, completely out of context email.

I’m not taking advantage of Spark’s collaboration tools, but would love to convince my team to at least try these features. Spark includes built in ways to privately chat around emails and events with a team, and to even write emails together in real time.

This may sound unnecessary to some, but a few years into the Slack revolution in office communication, I can’t help but feel Slack (and Microsoft Teams) can often do more harm than good, creating unrealistic expectations of an always on, constantly notified workforce. Despite the promise of Slack, email is far from dead, so perhaps the ability to just chat when needed around email is a healthier way to approach team communication.