 OK, well, welcome everybody. Meredith and I were starting to feel the pressure of not doing a podcast. The guys are kind of winning with the reclaim today. So we thought we would jump on today and talk about Spark, which is a new email client, not necessarily new. I've been kind of playing around with them for a while now. But we were a big airmail team for a while. And I'm always kind of looking for the biggest and the baddest in terms of tools. I have a whole category on my blog that just goes to tools that I find, different applications, things that make me more efficient. And so I came across Spark a couple of weeks ago and just decided to give it a try. And I actually have really, really liked it and then got Meredith on it. Yeah, you sparked my interest with that. And it's been cool because there's actually a lot of team-building capabilities as well. And so we got Tim on board. And we're trying to get Jim on board. Yeah, we're hoping this episode gets Jim on board. We'll sway him. So we just wanted to spend a couple minutes today to talk about what we like about it, why it's super cool, and hopefully maybe persuade you to use it as well. So anyway, if you guys are like me or like us, I manage five inboxes, five separate emails. And yeah, and so I kind of need something, one, to help me manage all of that, but also filter through the just crap, the newsletters, the notifications, all of that. I want to be able to see what's important as soon as I get on my email. And I want it to integrate with things like my calendar and just take the place of, I don't know, like it just has a lot of cool team-building capabilities. So my favorite thing about Spark, actually there's a lot of favorite things, but my favorite thing is probably the smart inbox, which you can't really, I mean, obviously I can explain it, but you don't really see it or understand it fully until you have it yourself and it starts filtering out your inbox for you. It is incredibly smart, so it has a good name. But essentially, I don't have my regular inbox turned on anymore, I only look at it through the smart inbox filter, which essentially, I'm literally looking at my email now, it's pulled into categories. So it separates your emails as they come in and it filters them into categories. So I have a personal category and notifications category, newsletters, and then scene. Now, are you able to change those categories, do you know? I think so, and there's more that populate depending on what you sort through. So I have a section for PIN, so those are my star emails or the ones that I want to remember or refer back to in a couple days or add to my calendar or anything like that. No, that's a good point, yeah, things that you star. I haven't used that capability much, but it's super great because it allows me to, again, filter through the shit. So I can basically open it up on my phone or my laptop and I can see all of the important emails at the top and then all of the newsletters and things that I really need to unsubscribe to towards the bottom. And so it's nice, especially coming back from summer vacation and that sort of thing and you don't have to filter through 40 notifications before you find your first important email. So anyway, smart inbox, super awesome. Definitely one of my favorite things. What about you? Did you want to talk about the calendar? Yeah, I can honestly, that's another great integration between Spark and even Google Calendar or just your regular iCal or whatever calendar app you use. They offer a calendar section within your inbox so you can automatically add, if you have an event coming through as a notification, you can add it to your calendar. And so Warren and I were actually planning this podcast and we wanted to sit down and talk about it and we used the calendar feature to set up the event on our calendar and so that Tim and Jim and everyone else knew what we were doing. And it's also nice because you don't have to leave your inbox to look at another calendar. Yeah, you should share your screen to show that because it really does. I mean, you have your day view, your week view and your month view, just like normal, just like any sort of thing, but then you also have a kind of a sidebar on the side that shows your week and then the day comes across really nicely. Say you have your day schedule. Yeah, give me one second to share. Yeah, there you go. So yeah, as you can see, we've got Meredith's calendar up here, but it's just kind of cool. I know, so I have it set up as a day view rather than like a week or a month view because I tend to, we kind of roll through our own routine throughout the day, so it's kind of nice to refer to to the calendar to see where people are. And you can also see like the next days in advance, so like down here, like tomorrow on Friday, you can just kind of at a glance and it's cool little tidbit too, there's the weather. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't have that on mind. I have no idea how that happened, but it just kind of shows you like, oh, should I bring my rain jackets work or something? But it's also, this is cool too, because you can see kind of how it's set up. I'm not going to go into my own inbox. Yeah, and it's worth noting here, like you have a whole folder section, but I think, I don't know if it's under recents or whatever, but I have a favorite section on mine that has where I've kind of filtered my emails into things like different kinds of discussions. So I have one for domain of one zone and one for travel confirmations and one for invoicing and that sort of thing. So that's been really helpful because I can follow back on conversations that way and kind of organize my inbox. So I guess the overall point with that is that it's just, it's very customizable and I had no idea that you could have the weather and stuff too. Yeah, I have no idea how that even happened. A lot of this I've just like stumbled into like after our conversations about it and the other thing I really like, which has made it a huge game changer since Meredith has come on and Tim has come on is that there's this team functionality built in that really does take out even more email. Reclaim hosting is very against email in a lot of ways since adopting Spark in our early day, or not Spark but Slack in our early days. Absolutely. That's kind of been a huge way for us to get away from the email. So the fact that we've now found a client that basically helps with that is a really good thing. So what I mean by that is, okay I guess a good example would be those domain email notifications that come in from our registrar. Yeah, throughout the day we just get a ton of notifications on if something doesn't register properly or an account doesn't get created properly we get an email saying it's failed. And with Spark there's a comment feature that the at the bottom of the email where anybody who has Spark can comment similar to Slack or. So it's broken up into teams actually we should, I should preface that too is you can have different teams so we have a reclaim hosting one and then your personal. So it's not, you can't just comment on someone else's email you have to be within that same team. Yeah, so I think we are all able to do it because we have the reclaim hosting email address. You know Gmail we're built into that G Suite and so we're able to automatically be a team. So it's really nice because you know if we're talking like for instance if Jim and I are copied on the same email from, well I guess it doesn't really work with Jim but the idea would be that if Jim had Spark, Jim intent if Jim had Spark it would be really cool because if we were copied on an email together we could kind of like this is showing we could basically comment on the email almost like shared Google Docs or like, even like an instant messenger or something. It's almost immediate. Tim and I were scheduling a meeting the other day with our, with DigitalOcean and our DigitalOcean account manager reached out to both of us and said, hey would this time work to talk about so and so this and that and Tim and I were very easily able to comment on the email without leaving the client area without going to Slack, without talking to each other. I mean I'm in a different office now so we were able to just comment right on that email and say this date will work for me, this date will work for me and it just, so in a lot of ways it's really, really convenient. It just saves that extra email going back and forth to check with the person you're working with or and with those notification emails we're able to just comment saying I process this without sending email and I tend to send the email and then forget to untag a certain email and then it goes through to our Slack, to our support channel. So I like the comment feature just because it's quick and easy. It's one less thing to do. It's one less email to send which honestly makes a huge difference when you've got a lot going on. The other thing, you could tell I like spark a little bit. The other thing I really like is that the search feature is good, which is kind of underrated because you can tell when a search feature is bad and air mails is bad. I mean I like the air mails viewer for multiple inboxes and I think it does it really well but that is not worth dealing with the search feature and what spark looks okay enough managing multiple emails you could kind of see in when Meredith shared her screen earlier she had a couple emails there at the top and honestly that's fine. I can look at each inbox separately or all together in a big group and the search allows me to go through archived things, deleted things from all my inboxes I can search dates or first names I can search for attachments like it's just as good as Gmail's search if not better in my opinion. And that's really what made the switch for me seamless. Yeah, super seamless. I think that's what sold to. Yeah, exactly. I think like searching on airmail you had to like put one term in and then if it didn't return your result you had to like reword everything. It was just whole massive spark made it so much easier and the price tag was great. How much does it cost? We didn't mention it but it's actually free. That's right. So if you're looking for a free mail client. I couldn't remember if it was free or if it was like two bucks or something. Yeah, it was free. If you go to their website sparkmailapp.com it's a free download. That's right. It is and it's worth it you guys. It is, I promise. I'm not. Absolutely. It's serious. And I mean, you guys, yeah, you can go and read through their functionalities and stuff. There's a lot of great things. You can schedule your emails for later. You can snooze notifications. So for me if I'm in a meeting and I see a notification come across my screen that I got an important email I'll snooze it to have it remind me later on. So that sort of thing or if it's 459 on a Thursday I might have it remind me to show up first thing in my inbox on 8 AM on Friday morning. That sort of thing. And then the other big thing is those email signatures which you can obviously customize based on inbox but I actually read a blog post recently on kind of tweaking those for bigger for more templated responses. So using the signature section and writing an entire email essentially in that and saving it as a template. You work with that a lot in like this investment macro. So it's kind of the same thing. It's kind of a cool hack to use as a signature rather than actual template. Yeah. And I tweeted to Spark kind of saying, is this a feature that you guys would think about taking care of this idea of templated emails which I think Gmail has something like that where you can template responses and save them which does help if the responses you're writing or take 30 minutes to draft. So they were responsive to it and said that they would talk about it but for the time being this has been a cool hack. So if that's something of interest I can link that blog post around. Check out the description below. Yeah, like and subscribe. Like and subscribe for more. Oh, you can also, another cool feature is the quick reply. So you can send an emoji like thumbs up or like a yeah, this is a great sort of response. Yeah, in the, gosh, in the, this is the time for emojis, you know? This is, emojis are big and slack and everything now just needs like a GIF integration, basically. Yeah, that'd be great. But yeah, it's super smooth. Beautiful iPhone app, beautiful Mac app. And I was seeing on their site that they have a watch. I don't wear my watch as much anymore but I'll have to check that out. Okay, yeah, I don't have the watch but yeah, it's just, it's really, it's really cool, you guys. There's not really much else we got to say. Very cool. Anyway, so with that, we're gonna sign off for the day. Catch you in the next episode. But if you guys have any questions or comments about Spark, let us know. Absolutely. Or if you find something even better, we're always on the lookout for that. I don't think we could convince Tim and Jim to jump ship too many more times. But we're pretty happy with Spark. So we just wanted to spread the love because one, it's free and two, it's awesome. And sometimes that is hard to find in the same application. So. Absolutely. Have a good day, guys. Yeah, thanks for reclaiming. Woo-hoo.