What are your feelings toward your email inbox? There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there in the world who want to “kill” email using instant messaging and other tools. But Spark wants to rehabilitate the old inbox and make you love it. The app tries to do this with a super-clean layout that lets you run fairly complex but also nontechnical searches, such as “From Joe with a PDF attached.” Like other email apps, you can customize what happens when you swipe left or right on a message, so you can quickly mark things as read, pin them to the top of your inbox or even save them to a service such as Evernote.

You can also set smart notifications to cut down email clutter on your lock screen — only the important messages come through. It can be hard to persuade people to use an email app that isn’t the default one on their phones. And, for some, Spark’s features aren’t going to be worth downloading yet another app. But if your inbox is driving you crazy and seems like more of a drain on your productivity than a plus, Spark is worth a try.

— Hayley Tsukayama