I’ve written several times about my particular email setup; I currently use MailMate on the Mac, but I am able to use other applications, even Apple’s Mail, to achieve it. A quick recap:

• a smart folder for emails received today, addressed only to me
• a similar folder for all emails received today
• a smart folder for emails received yesterday, addressed only to me
• a clone of this folder for all emails received yesterday

I work out of these four smart folders, rather than my inbox, and try, to the degree possible, not to let anything fall outside of these four folders without being archived or sent to OmniFocus.

The problem is iOS; there’s nothing like Mail.app or MailMate on iPhone or iPad. I don’t care that much about iPhone; I don’t consider the iPhone to be a device where I’m going to do much more than reply to an emergent email for which I’ve gotten a notification.

I have used and like Mail very much on iOS. The attention another application, AirMail, received, however, always had me trying it out, and eventually I tried Spark too. Spark makes the cut as being the closest to a desktop app for me, with the features I rely on to make email manageable.

Smart Folders

Both Airmail and Spark have offered savable searches, but Spark in its most recent versions has improved their saved searches (Smart Folders, in Spark speak). One of the most useful improvements that separated Spark from Airmail for me was the immediate updating of the search results. In AirMail, for example, archiving a message from my “Today in Inbox” saved search would not obscure or “move” the message until I left the smart folder and returned to it. With the most recent release of Spark, Smart Folders work just as they should (and how I expected them to work coming from Mail and MailMate).

Integration

My only hang up using Spark is that it uses its own URL scheme (readdle-spark://…) rather than mail://, which is the scheme that MailMate and Mail both use. In practice, this only matters when you’re sharing URLs between apps. In my use case, sending an email to OmniFocus is something I frequently do; if it is added on my Mac, the URL for the message follows the mail:// scheme. This results in Mail on iOS being opened if I click on a link. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but requires that both Spark and Mail be configured for the same accounts on both your iPad and Mac.

Of course, you can’t specify a default email client on iOS, which produces the jarring experience of Mail opening up when you expect Spark from time to time. That needs to be fixed posthaste.