In my review of 2Do in December, I dedicated one of the last sections to Email to 2Do, the then beta plugin to capture incoming email messages as tasks in the app.

Here’s how I described Email to 2Do:

With Email to 2Do, Gilani has built an invisible email client into 2Do to directly access your email inbox and turn messages into tasks. Without having to rely on a web app that looks into the contents of your email to read text from messages, 2Do locally and securely connects to common email providers (including IMAP servers) without exposing information to third-parties – just like Apple Mail. Then, 2Do periodically checks for new messages that match a specific syntax, and, if it finds one, it turns it into a task in your inbox.

With this implementation, you don’t see any of the client part; you don’t configure mailboxes or even see individual messages into 2Do. You just configure your account (if you use Gmail, all it’s done over OAuth), choose how you want messages to trigger 2Do, and you’re set.

The gist of the idea hasn’t changed in the past two months: Email to 2Do is an email client built into 2Do that doesn’t display an email-like interface to the user. Its sole job is to connect to your email inbox and monitor new messages as they arrive. If they match rules assigned by you in the Settings, they will be saved as tasks in the inbox or another designated list.

For anyone who’s been trying dozens of task managers since the opening of the App Store in 2008¹, it’s easy to see how Email to 2Do is such a genius, deceptively simple idea. For years, developers have tried to come up with extensions and custom integrations to circumvent the lack of communication between email clients and todo apps – often with laudable results. 2Do’s Fahad Gilani has instead gone in a parallel direction: what would a task manager do if it was capable of reading emails natively? Instead of bringing task management to the email client, could email itself become a feature of the task manager?

With Email to 2Do now publicly available as part of the app’s 3.8 update, it’s time to revisit its functionality and elaborate on how it’s been working out for me so far, as well as how it could be extended in the future.

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I’ve made no secret of my complicated relationship with email over the years.

While I’m always trying to optimize my email setup and finding new ways to spend as little time managing email as possible (for instance, I let SaneBox categorize emails on my behalf), my underlying problem lies in the scarcity of desktop-class email clients for iOS with specific features I’m looking for. As I shared in an episode of AppStories, these include: modern email options such as snoozing, read receipts, or “send later”; the ability to customize the app’s sidebar with mailboxes and saved searches; and app integrations to save messages into other iOS apps either as links or PDFs.

I’ve tried dozens of different email apps for the iPhone and iPad over the years. Some of them stuck for several months on my Home screen, like Airmail; some turned out to be ill-fated experiments; others were stuck in the old mindset of offering a “light” companion version on iOS and a “real” counterpart for the Mac.

Spark, developed by Readdle, has been at the forefront of innovation in email clients since its iPhone debut three years ago. In my original review, I noted how, despite several limitations (such as the lack of iPad and Mac versions) and an unclear business model, Spark was a new kind of email experience that felt refreshingly powerful, especially when compared to Apple’s stale Mail app. Spark gained a host of welcome enhancements in the past couple of years: in addition to being fully multi-platform on Apple devices, Spark is now capable of snoozing messages and sending them later; on the Mac, besides smarter search, Spark can even save messages into apps like Bear and Things.

I’ve gone back to Spark as my primary email app a handful of times over the past three years. Ultimately, I always stopped using Spark because it lacked feature parity with the Mac version (app integrations were never ported to iOS); most recently, I started using Apple Mail again because its drag and drop support in iOS 11 allowed me to “manually” integrate it with Things, Notes, and other apps.

This context is necessary to understand Spark 2, which is launching today on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and which Readdle touts as the biggest update to Spark since the original app from May 2015. Spark 2 is a peculiar upgrade: on one hand, it won’t look that different to individual users, save for a couple noteworthy exceptions; on the other, it’s a major reinvention of Spark for teams, which explains why Readdle is hedging the app’s future on collaboration and a subscription-based business model (albeit with a generous free tier). The developers at Readdle are betting heavily on a vision that sees Spark as the centerpiece of email communication for teams – a platform in its own right, with all the upsides and potential issues that it entails.

For that reason, this can’t be a full, in-depth review of Spark 2. As a team, we’ve only had access to Spark 2 for the past three weeks, and we haven’t had a chance yet to test the app during one of the busiest periods of the year such as WWDC. I’m going to need more time for a full verdict and to understand how the MacStories team can be set up as a Spark organization. However, I believe that Spark 2 is the closest I’ve ever been to finding my ideal email client, and I want to explain why.

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