On Spark (and Others) Replacing Mailbox
In light of Mailbox’s shutdown this week, many people are racing to recommend the services of other comparable or better options to fill the void left by Mailbox's functions. One of the most commonly recommended is Readdle's Spark. Spark is an awesome application. If you are an avid Mailbox user, then Spark is a no-brainer transition; It features customizable long and short swipe gestures, mail snoozing, smart search, and deep integration with other productivity applications. They're also working on iPad and Mac version that are looking pretty awesome from early mock-ups. It's powerful, thoughtfully designed, and remarkably well supported by a very capable team based out of the Ukraine. I really like and admire what I've seen by the folks at Readdle.
However... Spark is not for me.
As impressive as Spark's1 features and capabilities are, it suffers from two of the biggest concerns I had about Mailbox: It's free, and it relies on your giving Readdle the login credentials for all of your mail accounts and letting your email traffic pass through their servers.
Look, I'm not advocating that you get some Cat-5 installed in your house and run your own email server in a locked, alarmed closet. For 99.99% of us, our personal and professional email needs to pass through or reside on someone else's servers. It's just the nature of using a networked medium in the modern world.
But, to the extent possible, I feel better trusting the bevy of my personal information that lay in my email (e.g. receipts, home addresses, shopping history, personal communications with loved ones, et cetera) with someone that I'm paying to take very good care of it. Imagine that you were hiring someone to provide twenty four hour, physical security for your house. Whoever you select would move into your home, be there at all times, while you're asleep and awake, when you're home and when you're not. If you were going to hire a complete stranger to fill this role, would you go with a stranger offering to do it for "free," and who holds no accountability for what happens in your house under their watch? For some people, financial limitations or the fact that they're just not particularly worried about someone possibly ransacking their house may mean that yes, they would be glad to have someone do it for free. I legitimately don't mean to imply any snark when I say that is absolutely, 100% OK. I just couldn't possibly live with that scenario.
On top of these concerns, I also just have a hard time recommending that people jump from one service that had to shut down because it wasn't generating enough meaningful revenue to another free service that isn't ostensibly generating revenue2... Especially for a service that I rely on as much as email.
Again, I really adore Spark. If there were more transparency into their security/privacy practices and they would let me pay them a subscription for the service, I'd be all over them, but that unfortunately isn't the reality of the situation at the moment.
N.B. Spark is not alone in having the issues I describe in this article- Inbox by Gmail and Outlook by Microsoft are also popular, free options with modern, smart inbox features... But Spark is the one I like the best. ↩︎
I am only guessing that it's not generating revenue based off of it being free- It's very possible that Readdle is deriving income off of it somehow, or that it's driving enough business to their other applications to be worth the development costs for them. ↩︎