Spark Mail

Spark offers three pricing tiers as of October 2025: Free plan ($0 with limited AI and 1 email account), Premium Individual ($7.99/month or $59.99/year - $4.99/month equivalent with 38% savings), and Premium Team ($9.99/user/month or $83.88/year - $6.99/month equivalent with 30% savings). The Free plan includes Smart Inbox and basic features with limited AI usage. Premium Individual adds unlimited AI features, Gatekeeper, templates, and unlimited accounts. Premium Team adds shared inboxes, shared drafts, team comments, and assignments. A 7-day free trial is available.

Yes, Spark offers a free plan with basic email features including Smart Inbox auto-categorization, unified inbox for multiple accounts, smart notifications, smart search, snooze, send later, reminders, and dark mode. However, the free plan has significant limitations: only 1 email account maximum, limited AI feature usage with monthly quota warnings at 10% remaining, and basic functionality only. For unlimited AI features, Gatekeeper, templates, and multiple accounts, you need Premium Individual at $5/month annually. Legacy users who created accounts before October 2022 keep all free features permanently.

Smart Inbox is Spark's AI-powered auto-categorization system that automatically sorts incoming emails into three tabs: Personal (important emails from real people), Newsletters (subscriptions and marketing), and Notifications (social media, services, receipts). Unlike Gmail's basic tabs, Smart Inbox learns from your behavior to improve sorting accuracy over time. You can quickly switch between tabs to focus on what matters and process emails faster by tackling Personal first, then batching Newsletters and Notifications for later. This reduces decision fatigue and helps you achieve inbox zero more efficiently.

Spark +AI includes six main features: Compose AI (write complete emails from simple prompts), AI Quick Reply (pre-filled responses like Interested/Not Interested/Thanks), AI Summary (summarize long emails in short/detailed/action points), AI Translate (translate emails between languages), AI Edit (proofread, rephrase, expand, shorten, adjust tone), and My Writing Style (AI analyzes 300+ characters from sent emails to learn your personal tone, greetings, sign-offs, and pacing). All AI features are powered by OpenAI GPT via Azure for privacy. Spark does NOT train AI models on your email data.

Spark is better for budget-conscious teams needing collaboration, while Superhuman is better for speed-focused sales professionals. Spark costs $60/year (6x cheaper than Superhuman's $360/year), has excellent team features like shared drafts and comments, works with any IMAP provider, and offers a generous free tier. Superhuman costs $30/month but delivers 100+ keyboard shortcuts for maximum speed, has CRM integrations with HubSpot/Salesforce, includes 1-on-1 onboarding training, and works with both Gmail and Outlook. Choose Spark for affordability and team collaboration; choose Superhuman for speed and sales CRM needs.

Yes, Spark works with Gmail, Outlook (Outlook.com and Microsoft 365), iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, Exchange, and any IMAP email account. This universal IMAP support makes Spark more flexible than Shortwave which only supports Gmail. However, Spark requires IMAP protocol and does not support POP3. The Shared Inboxes feature only works with Gmail accounts, not Outlook or other providers. All Spark features including Smart Inbox, AI compose, team collaboration, and calendar integration work across all supported email providers. You can connect unlimited email accounts with Premium Individual or Team plans.

Gatekeeper is Spark's AI-powered pre-screening feature that blocks emails from unknown senders before they reach your inbox, requiring approval to enter. When someone emails you for the first time, Gatekeeper holds the message in a separate queue where you can review, approve, or block the sender. Approved senders get whitelisted for future emails. This drastically reduces cold emails, spam, and unwanted marketing while ensuring important first-time senders don't get lost. Gatekeeper is only available on Premium Individual ($5/month) and Premium Team plans, not the free tier.

Yes, Spark excels at team collaboration, which is a major advantage over Superhuman. The Premium Team plan ($7/month per user) includes shared inboxes for Gmail accounts, shared drafts with real-time editing like Google Docs, team comments to discuss emails privately, email assignments to delegate messages to team members, shared templates for consistent communication, team file storage, and email sharing via secure links with read statuses. This makes Spark ideal for customer support teams, sales teams, and small businesses managing shared email accounts. Collaboration features are Spark's biggest strength versus speed-focused competitors.

My Writing Style is Spark's unique AI feature that analyzes your sent emails to learn your personal writing voice, including greetings, sign-offs, pacing, formality level, and technical terminology. After analyzing 300+ characters from your sent messages, Spark's AI Compose feature generates drafts that authentically sound like you wrote them, not generic AI text. You can review how AI understands your style in Settings and update the analysis anytime. This personalization makes Spark's AI writing more authentic than generic AI, though not as advanced as Shortwave's Ghostwriter which learns voice even better.

Yes, but it depends on your plan. The Free plan supports only 1 email account maximum. Premium Individual ($5/month annually) and Premium Team ($7/month per user) support unlimited email accounts from any IMAP provider including Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, and custom domains. All connected accounts appear in a unified inbox where you can see all emails in one place or view accounts separately. Smart Inbox categorization works across all accounts. You can quickly switch between accounts and compose emails from any connected address. Legacy users from before October 2022 may have different account limits.

Spark is secure but has privacy trade-offs due to server-side processing. Spark uses SSL/STARTTLS encryption for connections and is GDPR compliant. However, unlike end-to-end encrypted email clients, Spark processes emails on its servers to enable AI features, Smart Inbox categorization, and cross-device sync. The good news: Spark uses Azure OpenAI which does NOT train AI models on your email data, and Spark is transparent about data handling. The bad news: server-side architecture means no true end-to-end encryption is possible. For maximum privacy, use ProtonMail or Tutanota instead.

Spark offers native apps for iOS (iPhone, iPad), Android, macOS, Windows, and Apple Watch with full cross-device sync. All features including Smart Inbox, AI compose, team collaboration, and calendar integration work identically across platforms. The latest Spark Desktop Beta (June 2025) introduced v2 mode with unread cards and multiple window support for improved productivity. Unlike web-only email clients, Spark provides true native app performance optimized for each operating system. However, some features are platform-specific, such as Quick Replies which are only available on iOS devices.

Yes, Spark includes email templates for frequently sent messages, but only on Premium Individual and Premium Team plans, not the free tier. You can create custom templates with placeholders for personalization, save commonly used responses, and quickly insert templates when composing emails. Premium Team users also get shared templates so entire teams can use consistent messaging for customer support, sales outreach, or internal communications. Templates work across all devices and sync via cloud. You can organize templates into categories and search them quickly. This feature saves significant time for repetitive emails.

Yes, Spark includes Send Later scheduling available on all plans including Free. You can schedule emails to send at a specific date and time, which is useful for timing emails to recipients' time zones, avoiding off-hours sending, or composing emails in advance. Scheduled emails are stored in Spark's cloud and sent automatically at the specified time even if your device is offline. You can edit or cancel scheduled emails before they send. The Send Later feature integrates with Spark's natural language processing, so you can type times like "tomorrow 9am" for quick scheduling.

Spark Free includes basic email with Smart Inbox, unified inbox, smart notifications, snooze, send later, reminders, and limited AI usage, but restricts you to 1 email account and warns when AI quota reaches 10%. Premium Individual ($5/month annually) unlocks unlimited AI features (Compose, Summary, Translate, Edit), My Writing Style learning, Gatekeeper pre-screening, Priority Email, templates, app integrations, smart folders, removal of 'Sent with Spark' signature, and unlimited email accounts. Premium Team ($7/month per user) adds team collaboration: shared inboxes (Gmail only), shared drafts, comments, assignments, and team file storage.