1Getting Started

Requesting Access

Spark is invite-only. If you don't have an account yet, click Request access on the login page. Fill in your name, email, and reason — an admin will review your request and send an invite if approved.

Accepting an Invite

Onboarding

On first login you'll set your name, voice preferences, theme, and workspace names. These can all be changed later in Settings.

Signing In

Go to spark.elitesrvcs.com and enter your email and password. Click Forgot password? to receive a reset link.

Install Spark as an App

Spark can be installed as a standalone app so it runs in its own window — no browser tabs or address bar — with its own icon on your taskbar, dock, or home screen. Installing also improves notification reliability when Spark isn't the active tab. Your data is unaffected: everything lives on the server, so installing, uninstalling, or reinstalling never touches your tasks, reminders, or settings.

Desktop — Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome

The quickest way: with Spark open, look at the far right of the address bar for a small install icon (a monitor with a downward arrow, or a ⊕). Click it, then click Install. Spark opens in its own window and adds an icon you can pin to your taskbar.

If you don't see the address-bar icon, use the menu instead:

• Edge: click the ⋯ menu (top right) → More tools → Apps → Install this site as an app.
• Chrome: click the ⋮ menu (top right) → Cast, save, and share → Install Spark… (wording may vary slightly by version; look for an "Install" option).

Once installed, you can launch Spark from your Start menu, taskbar, or desktop shortcut. In Edge you can also manage installed apps at edge://apps (Chrome: chrome://apps).

iPhone & iPad — Safari

Open spark.elitesrvcs.com in Safari (this only works in Safari on iOS, not Chrome). Tap the Share button (the square with an upward arrow), scroll down, tap Add to Home Screen, then tap Add. The Spark icon appears on your home screen and launches full-screen.

Android — Chrome

Open Spark in Chrome, tap the ⋮ menu, and tap Add to Home screen (or Install app if a banner appears). Confirm, and the Spark icon is added to your home screen and app drawer.

Uninstalling

To remove the installed app: open Spark's own window menu and choose Uninstall, or remove it from edge://apps / chrome://apps (desktop), or long-press the icon and remove it (mobile). Uninstalling only removes the app shortcut — your Spark account and data remain safe on the server and are still available at spark.elitesrvcs.com.

Staying Up to Date

When a new version of Spark is released, you'll see a small “A new version of Spark is available” bar appear at the bottom of the screen. Click Reload to switch to the latest version, or dismiss it and finish what you're doing first — it'll come back on the next check. Spark never reloads on its own, so you won't lose anything you're working on.

2The Interface

Header Bar

Timer Bar

A persistent ⏱ Timers bar sits just below the header at all times. When no timers are active it shows a + button — click it to set a new countdown timer. When one or more timers are running, each appears as a chip showing the label and remaining time (mm:ss). Chips pulse red when time is up; click ✓ Done to dismiss.

Tab Bar

Today · Tasks · Reminders · Calendar · Notes · Scheduling · Spark AI · Settings

Use 1–7 to switch tabs. Last active tab is remembered across refreshes. Tabs with overdue items show a red badge count.

Beta Banner

When an admin enables Beta Testing mode, an amber 🧪 BETA banner appears below the header. The 💬 Feedback button in the header bar is always available — use it to report a bug, make a suggestion, or give general feedback at any time, regardless of whether the beta banner is showing.

Messages from the Spark Team

From time to time you may receive an email from the Spark Team — a reply to feedback you submitted, or a direct note about your account or the app. These arrive at your registered email address. You can reply directly to the email if you have a question.

Version

The current app version is displayed in small text above the weather widget in the sidebar.

3Workspaces

Workspaces keep different areas of your life separate. All data is scoped to the active workspace.

Managing Workspaces

4Today View

Your daily command centre — everything requiring attention right now, in one place.

Stats & Progress

Stats row shows Due Today, Overdue, Done, and Alerts. A progress bar tracks your completion percentage. If tasks have time estimates set, the total estimated time remaining shows below the bar.

Streak

A 🔥 badge appears next to the date when you've completed tasks on consecutive days (2+). Completing at least one task each day keeps it going.

Weather

Set your zip code in Settings → Profile to see current conditions (temperature, feels-like, humidity, wind). Updates automatically at the top of every hour.

Today's Schedule

Calendar events for today appear in a compact timeline — showing start/end times, a Now pill for currently active events, and Soon for anything starting within the hour. Feed-imported events show a 🔗 icon.

Events starting within 15 minutes enter an urgent state — the row pulses with an amber glow and a 🔔 countdown badge shows exact minutes remaining (e.g. 🔔 8m). Click Silence on the right of the row to stop the animation for that event.

Once a timed event's end time passes, it is automatically struck through and dimmed — keeping it visible for reference while making it clear it's done. All-day events are not affected.

Smart Nudges

Spark surfaces up to 2 proactive action cards — overdue pile-ups, stale follow-ups, unscheduled backlogs, upcoming events. Tap to act immediately.

Alerts

Reminders due within the next hour and follow-ups due today or overdue appear in the Alerts section with Done, Edit, Snooze, and Delete buttons inline.

Upcoming Follow-Ups

Any follow-up due in the next 7 days (but not yet overdue) appears in a pink 👤 Upcoming Follow-Ups section so people never fall through the cracks.

In Progress Tasks

Tasks with status set to In Progress are pinned at the top of Today with their progress bar visible.

Focus Timer

Click 15m, 30m, 45m, or 60m to start a focused session. Spark announces 5 min remaining, 1 min remaining, and completion.

Pinned Tasks

Tasks you've starred (★) float to the top in a dedicated Pinned section.

5Tasks

Adding a Task

Quick Capture: type in the header bar and press Enter. Full form: Tasks tab → + Add, or click any task to edit. You can also ask Spark AI to create tasks for you conversationally.

Task Fields

Task Status

Status gives you real visibility into where work actually stands. Set it from the full task form. In Progress tasks show a thin blue progress bar on every task card and are pinned at the top of Today. Cancelled tasks are hidden from the active list but visible in a collapsed section at the bottom of the Tasks tab.

Task Actions

• Complete (✓) — click the circle. Automatically sets status to Completed. Recurring tasks auto-generate the next occurrence
• Pin (★) — star a task to float it to the top of Today and Tasks
• Save as Template — saves a copy as a reusable template (no due date)
• Drag to reorder — grab ⋮ handle (requires Manual sort mode)
• Swipe right — on mobile, swipe right to mark done

Sorting & Filtering

Sort by Priority, Due Date, A–Z, or Manual. Filter by Critical only, High+, Med+, In Progress, or On Hold.

Templates

Switch to the Templates view in the Tasks tab. Click Use to create a pre-filled task from any template.

Attachments

Open any existing task to edit it — the Attachments section appears near the top of the modal, below the title and workspace fields.

• 📎 Add File — click to pick an image or document from your device. Accepted types: images (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP), PDF, DOCX, XLSX. Max 5 files per task
• Paste a screenshot — take a screenshot (Win+Shift+S on Windows, Cmd+Shift+4 on Mac), then press Ctrl+V inside the modal. Spark uploads it automatically
• Image compression — images are automatically compressed before upload (targeting ~500KB) without visible quality loss
• Viewing — click any image thumbnail to open it fullscreen. Documents show an Open link to view in a new tab
• Deleting — click ✕ on any attachment to remove it permanently

Comments

Add timestamped comments to any task to document actions, communications, or progress notes — without cluttering the task title or notes field.

Opening Comments

Every task card across Today's Schedule, the Tasks tab, and all other views shows a 💬 button to the left of the ★ pin button. Click it from anywhere to open the task's edit panel scrolled directly to the Comments section. You can also open any task normally and scroll to the bottom — the Comments section is always there.

• The 💬 button is amber with a count badge when comments exist, grey when there are none
• The badge count updates in real time as you add or remove comments

Adding a Comment

Type in the comment textarea at the bottom of the Comments section and click Post, or press Ctrl+Enter. Every comment is automatically stamped with the date and time it was posted.

Editing a Comment

Click Edit on any comment to edit it inline. The original text is pre-filled — make your changes and click Save, or Cancel to discard. Edited comments show a small (edited) label so you know the original was modified.

Deleting a Comment

Click Delete and confirm the prompt. Deletion is permanent.

6Reminders

Time-based alerts. When a reminder fires, a toast appears and Spark speaks it aloud.

Adding a Reminder

Reminders tab → + Reminder, Quick Capture, or ask Spark AI naturally — "remind me to call John at 3pm tomorrow."

• remind me at 3pm
• remind me tomorrow at 9am
• remind me in 2 hours
• remind me on Friday

Reminder Fields

7Follow-Ups

People-based reminders — track who you need to follow up with and about what.

Adding a Follow-Up

Quick Capture: follow up with [name] about [topic] in [N] days
Or ask Spark AI: "add a follow-up with Sarah about the contract in 3 days"
Or: Reminders tab → + Follow-Up.

Visibility on Today

Follow-ups due today or overdue appear in the Alerts section on Today. Anything due in the next 7 days appears in the Upcoming Follow-Ups section — so you always have a forward view without going into the Reminders tab.

Follow-Up Fields

Contacts View

Toggle to Contacts in the Reminders tab to see all interactions grouped by person — last contacted date, open follow-ups count, and full history. Tap + Follow-Up on any contact to add one pre-filled with their name.

8Calendar

Views

Toggle Month / Week at the top right. Use ← → to navigate; click Today to return.

What Appears

• Events — shown with their chosen colour
• 🔗 Imported events — from connected iCal feeds
• ☑ Tasks with due dates — shown in green. Click to edit. In Week view, tasks with a set time appear in their hour slot; tasks with only a date appear in the All Day row.

Calendar Event Alerts

Spark will announce upcoming calendar events 15 minutes before they start — a toast notification and a voice alert — so you're never caught off guard.

Pre-Meeting Silence Reminders

Spark also gives you two heads-up nudges to silence audio before a scheduled event so notifications don't interrupt your meeting:

• 5 minutes before — a brief voice prompt suggesting you tap the 🔔 Silence button if you don't want interruptions during the meeting.
• At the start — a second voice prompt as the meeting begins, in case you missed the first one.

These reminders are skipped automatically if Silence Mode is already on or if voice is disabled in your settings — no nagging when it isn't needed.

Adding Events

Click any day cell (month) or time slot (week) to add an event. Fields: Title, Start/End, All Day toggle, Recurring, Colour, Notes.

Calendar Integrations (iCal)

Connect an external calendar so events sync into Spark automatically. Go to Settings → Calendar Integrations → + Add Calendar, give it a name, paste the iCal URL, and click Add & Sync. Spark syncs on app load and then automatically re-syncs in the background every 15 minutes while the app is open — so calendar changes made in Outlook or Google Calendar propagate without any manual action. You can also force an immediate sync with the ↻ button in Settings.

Sync is fully bi-directional with your feed's current state — including cancellations, reschedules, and cancelled occurrences of recurring meetings. If a meeting is cancelled or removed by the organiser in Outlook, it is automatically removed from Spark on the next sync. If a single occurrence of a recurring meeting is cancelled, only that occurrence is removed — the rest of the series stays intact. If a recurring meeting is rescheduled to a new time, Spark updates the occurrence rather than leaving the old slot on your schedule. Spark also automatically clears any duplicate copies of a recurring occurrence that can build up over time, so each event appears only once. The sync toast shows a count of new, updated, and removed events so you can confirm changes were picked up.

Block Bookings Toggle

Each connected feed has a Block bookings toggle (off by default). When turned on, events from that feed hide corresponding booking slots so contacts cannot request times when you are busy. Only enable this for calendars that reflect your own schedule — shared or team calendars where colleagues' events appear should be left off to avoid false positives. All-day events from an opted-in feed block the entire day.

Google Calendar

Outlook / Microsoft 365

Apple Calendar (Mac)

9Notes

Notes display as a collapsible list — all notes start collapsed so you see just titles. Click any note to expand it inline and start editing. Click it again to collapse.

Creating a Note

Click + Note at the top of the Notes tab, or Quick Capture: note: [title], or ask Spark AI to create one for you.

Navigating Notes

Each row shows the note title, last updated date, and a 📌 icon if pinned. A ▶ chevron collapses and ▼ means open. Only one note is open at a time — opening a new one collapses the previous. Toggle All WS at the top to see notes from every workspace.

Searching Notes with AI

Ask Spark AI natural questions about your notes — "what did I write about the Johnson account?" or "search my notes for the marketing plan" — and Spark will read and summarise the relevant content directly in chat.

Rich Text Toolbar

Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough · H1, H2, H3, paragraph · Alignment · Bullet and numbered lists · Font size · Text colour and highlight · Clear formatting. Notes auto-save as you type.

@Task Mentions

Type @ in a note to get a live task picker. Mentioned tasks become clickable links — tap to jump straight to that task.

Pinning

Pin a note to keep it at the top of the list. Toggle All WS in the sidebar to see notes from every workspace.

10Scheduling

Create a public booking page where contacts can reserve time with you. All bookings require your approval before they are confirmed.

Setup

How Booking Requests Work

When someone submits a request through your booking page, they receive an email confirming their request is pending. You are notified by email, a toast notification, and a voice alert in real time. The request appears in the Pending Requests section at the top of your Scheduling tab.

On Accept

Accepting a request does three things automatically: the booking is confirmed in Spark, a calendar event is created in your Spark calendar, and both you and the booker receive a .ics calendar invite by email. Open the .ics in Outlook, Google Calendar, or Apple Calendar to add the meeting directly — no manual entry required. For Microsoft 365 users the invite lands on your Exchange calendar exactly like any other meeting invite.

On Decline

The booker receives a polite email advising them to reach out directly or try booking another available time. No calendar event is created.

Calendar Conflict Detection

Spark automatically hides booking slots that overlap with your calendar events — but only for feeds you have opted in to via the Block bookings toggle in Settings → Calendar Integrations. This gives you control over which feeds count as "busy" so shared team calendars don't accidentally block your availability. Events you add directly in Spark are always included in the check. See Calendar Integrations for setup details.

Your Booking Link

Once enabled, click Copy to copy the link and share it with anyone who needs to book time with you.

✨Spark AI

What Makes Spark AI Different

Most AI assistants can only talk about doing things. Spark AI actually does them. When you ask it to add a task, the task appears. When you say "remind me at 3pm", the reminder is set. When you want to reschedule something, it's moved. No copy-pasting, no switching screens — just a conversation that produces results.

Actions Spark AI Can Take

Context Spark AI Always Has

Every time you send a message, Spark AI is given a full snapshot of your workspace so its advice is grounded in your reality — not generic productivity platitudes.

Spark AI Learns and Remembers

Spark AI builds a persistent memory of you over time. When you reveal something worth remembering — your work preferences, recurring priorities, important context about your projects or role — Spark quietly notes it and includes it in every future conversation. You don't need to re-explain yourself session after session. The more you use it, the sharper its advice becomes.

Searching Your Notes

Spark AI can search and summarise the content of your notes on demand. Just ask naturally — no need to navigate to the Notes tab first.

Context-Aware Suggestions

When you open Spark AI, it doesn't show the same generic prompts every time. It reads your current state and surfaces 4 relevant suggestions based on what's actually going on:

• 3+ overdue tasks → "Triage X overdue tasks"
• In Progress work → "Check in on active work"
• Event starting soon → "Prep for: [event name]"
• Stale follow-ups → "Review overdue follow-ups"
• Monday morning → "Plan my week"
• Friday afternoon → "Week wrap-up"

Quick Capture from AI Responses

At the bottom of every Spark AI response, two quick buttons appear: ➕ Task and ⏰ Remind. If the AI says something that sparks an action item, tap either button to open the relevant form instantly — no need to leave the conversation.

Live Web Search

Spark AI automatically searches the web for anything that requires current information — weather, news, sports scores, stock prices, recent events. It will never answer these from stale training data.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Spark AI

• Be specific with actions. "Add a high priority task to call Dave about the contract renewal by Friday" works better than "add a task about Dave."
• Use it to plan, not just execute. "Help me plan my week" or "what should I focus on this afternoon?" gives Spark room to reason across your full workload.
• Ask it to triage. "I have 6 overdue tasks — help me decide what to tackle, push, or drop" is exactly the kind of question it's built for.
• Combine actions. "Add a task to review the proposal and remind me about it tomorrow morning" creates both the task and the reminder in one message.
• Ask about your notes. "What did I write about [topic]?" searches your full note content, not just titles.
• Talk to it via mic. Tap 🎤, speak naturally, pause — Spark captures everything and sends it when you stop.

Morning & Evening Check-Ins

If enabled in Settings, Spark speaks a morning briefing at your chosen time summarising tasks due today. An evening wrap-up reviews what you got done. Both can be configured or disabled in Settings → Notifications.

Chat History

Last 50 messages are saved across sessions. Click Clear History at the top of the AI tab to start fresh.

Interactive Mode

Enable in Settings → Voice to have Spark speak every AI response aloud when on the AI tab.

12Voice

Voice Input

Click 🎤 in the header to start recording. The mic button pulses red while recording and shows live elapsed seconds. Speak naturally — Spark uses high-accuracy transcription that handles names, brands, and technical terms correctly, with proper punctuation and capitalization. After 3 seconds of silence the recording stops automatically and the button pulses yellow while it transcribes (usually under a second). You can also tap the mic to stop early. Recordings are capped at 5 minutes to prevent runaway captures.

Voice input works in all modern browsers including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and iOS Safari.

Voice Routing

Where your voice goes depends on what's active when you tap the mic:

• No field focused — voice is sent to Spark AI, which interprets your speech and takes action (create task, set reminder, answer a question, etc.)
• A form field is actively focused — voice text is inserted directly into that field (e.g. dictating into the quick capture bar or a note)

Tapping the mic button itself moves focus away from any field, so voice from the Today tab, Tasks tab, or any other view will always route to Spark AI as expected.

Voice Output

Spark speaks: task completions, reminder alerts, calendar event alerts, focus milestones, morning briefing, evening wrap-up, and AI responses (if Interactive Mode is on).

Meeting reminders: Spark gives a single spoken heads-up 5 minutes before each meeting starts. If Auto-Silence During Meetings is on and the meeting is from a synced calendar, the reminder tells you Spark will mute itself for the meeting; otherwise it reminds you to tap the bell if you want quiet. The reminder is skipped while you're already silenced, so it won't interrupt a meeting in progress.

Voice Selection

• OpenAI voices — Nova, Shimmer, Alloy, Echo, Fable, Onyx. Require an API key set by your admin. Best quality.
• Browser voices — built into your device. Microsoft Edge on Windows provides the best browser voices.

Silence Mode

The 🔔 Silence button in the header lets you temporarily mute all of Spark's audio output — task completions, reminders, calendar event alerts, focus milestones, AI responses, everything. Click it to choose how long:

• 30 minutes, 1 hour, 90 minutes, 2 hours — timed silence, expires automatically
• Until I turn it off — stays silent indefinitely until you cancel manually

While silenced, the bell turns red and shows a small live countdown badge (e.g. "45m", "1h30m", or "∞"). The dropdown gains a Turn silence off option so you can cancel early. Silence persists across page refreshes — if you reload the app mid-meeting, you stay silenced. Visual toast notifications continue to show normally so you don't miss anything important; only audio is suppressed.

Auto-Silence During Meetings

Turn on Auto-Silence During Meetings (Settings → Voice) and Spark will automatically mute its voice for the length of each synced calendar meeting — no need to reach for the bell.

• How it works — When a synced, timed calendar event begins, Spark silences voice until that event's end time and shows a toast: "🔕 Auto-Silenced — Muted for [meeting] until [end time]." Voice returns automatically when the meeting ends.
• Only your synced calendar — Auto-silence applies to events from your connected calendar feeds (Outlook/M365, Google, Apple). All-day events and manually added Spark events do not trigger it.
• Never cuts a meeting short — If two meetings overlap or run back-to-back, silence only ever extends to the later end time; a shorter meeting can't un-silence you early. A manual "Until I turn it off" silence is never overridden.
• You're always in control — Each meeting auto-silences only once. If you manually turn silence back on during a meeting, Spark respects that and won't re-silence it.
• Meeting with no end time — Rarely, a synced event arrives without an end time. When that happens Spark pops up and asks how long to silence, offering the same choices as the bell (30 min, 1 hr, 90 min, 2 hr, or until you turn it off). Dismiss it to leave voice on.

Quiet Hours

Settings → Notifications → Quiet Hours. Voice is suppressed during this window automatically every day.

Troubleshooting

• Check device volume and that the browser tab is not muted
• Allow microphone permission when prompted; if you previously denied it, re-enable in your browser's site settings
• Confirm 🔔 Silence is not active and Quiet Hours are not in effect

13Settings

Profile

Voice

Notifications

Calendar Integrations

Add iCal feeds (Google, Outlook/M365, Apple) to sync external calendars into Spark. See Section 8 for setup instructions.

Email Integrations

Connect your Microsoft 365 / Outlook mailbox and turn on inbox listening. See Section 14 for details.

Appearance

Toggle Auto (follows system), Dark, or Light theme.

Workspaces

Edit, delete, and view stats per workspace. + Add Workspace up to your allocated maximum.

14Email

Spark can connect to your Microsoft 365 / Outlook mailbox, keep track of new mail as it arrives, sort it for you with AI triage, and let you read and act on messages without leaving Spark. You stay in control of what gets shared: AI triage is off until you turn it on, and email contents are never stored. Spark can also mark mail read in Outlook when you clear it here, so your inbox and your Smart Inbox stay in step.

Connecting Your Mailbox

Go to Settings → Email Integrations and click Connect Outlook. A Microsoft sign-in window opens; sign in with your work account and approve the request. Spark asks to read your mail and to mark messages read — the mark-read permission is what lets clearing an email in Spark also mark it read in Outlook. Spark never sends, deletes, or moves your mail. When it finishes, the window closes on its own and Settings shows Connected as [your address].

The sign-in happens in a small popup, so Spark stays open behind it. If nothing appears when you click Connect, check that your browser is not blocking popups for Spark.

If you connected before read-sync was added, you may see a Reconnect to sync read status banner at the top of the Mail tab. Click Reconnect Outlook once to grant the mark-read permission and the banner goes away. Until you do, clearing mail in Spark still works — it just won’t mark it read in Outlook yet.

What Spark Stores

Spark does not store the contents of your emails. For each new message it keeps only a reference — the subject, who it is from, when it arrived, and a link to open it in Outlook. The full email is always read live from Microsoft when needed, so Spark never becomes a copy of your inbox.

Inbox Listening

Once connected, the Email Integrations row shows an Inbox listening line. Click Start Listening and Spark begins tracking new inbox mail in real time. The line changes to Active, and from then on each new message that arrives is captured as a reference automatically.

If you ever need to refresh the connection to Microsoft’s notifications, the button becomes Restart — clicking it re-establishes listening. Listening keeps itself alive in the background; you do not need to restart it under normal use.

AI Triage

Turn on the AI triage toggle and Spark automatically sorts each new email into one of five categories, so you can tell at a glance what needs you:

Urgent — time-sensitive, needs prompt attention. Needs Reply — a message waiting on a written response from you. Task — something to do or track, but not necessarily a reply. FYI — informational, worth seeing but no action needed. Ignore — promotional or automated noise.

The toggle is off by default. When you turn it on, Spark reads the text of new emails to categorize them, but it stores only the category — never the email itself. The message text is used to decide the category and then discarded.

Turning the toggle off stops new mail from being categorized. It does not remove categories already assigned.

Mail Rules

Sometimes you know exactly where certain mail should go — a particular sender, everyone from a certain company, or any message with a specific subject. Mail Rules let you make that permanent. A rule always sorts matching mail into the category you choose, ahead of the AI, so you get consistent, predictable results for the mail you care about while the AI still handles everything else.

Making a rule from an email. Open any email and click ⚙ Make a Rule in the reading pane. Spark fills in the details from that message — the sender’s address, their domain, and the subject — and you simply tick which of these should have to match, then pick the category the mail should go into. A rule matches only when all the parts you ticked are true, so you can be as broad or as precise as you like: just a sender, everyone at a domain, a subject phrase, or a combination.

Replies and forwards are handled for you. Subject matching looks at the core subject line and ignores Re: and Fw: prefixes, so a rule you write for a subject also catches every reply and forward in that thread — they all land in the same place.

Re-sorting existing mail. When you save a rule, you can also re-sort mail already in your inbox that matches it. Matching messages move to the new category right away. From then on, every new email is checked against your rules automatically.

Managing your rules. Your rules live in Settings → Email Integrations under Mail Rules, where each one shows what it matches and where it sends mail. You can switch a rule off without deleting it, or remove it entirely. Turning a rule off stops it affecting new mail; it doesn’t change categories it has already applied.

Disconnecting

Click Disconnect on the Email Integrations row to remove your mailbox from Spark. This clears the stored connection and stops listening. You can reconnect at any time.

The Smart Inbox

The Mail tab is your Smart Inbox. When AI triage is on, your mail appears here grouped into the five categories, so the things that need you rise to the top and the noise stays out of the way.

Collapsing categories. To keep a busy inbox compact, four of the groups — Needs Reply, Task, FYI, and Ignore — can be folded to a single header line. Click a group’s header (with its ▶ / ▼ arrow) to fold or unfold it; the count stays visible either way, so you always see how many are in each. Urgent never collapses — the mail that needs you most is always open. Each time you open the Mail tab the four groups start folded; whatever you open or close then stays that way while you keep working. Empty categories are hidden automatically, and the Mail tab shows a badge counting how many urgent emails are waiting.

Each email card shows the subject, who it’s from, and when it arrived (with both the exact date/time and a friendly “2h ago”). Click any card to read the email right inside Spark — a reading pane opens with the sender, received time, category, and the message. For your privacy, remote images (often used to track whether you’ve opened a message) are blocked, and the full message is fetched fresh each time and never stored.

Emails open in a Readable view that adapts the message to Spark’s colors so it’s easy to read — some senders hard-code colors and backgrounds that clash with a dark screen and can be hard to make out. If you’d rather see a message exactly as it was sent, use the View: Readable / Original button to switch to its original styling; the button toggles back and forth, per email.

From a card or the reading pane, you have a few quick actions:

Open in Outlook — opens the full message in Outlook. + Task — creates a Spark task from the email, pre-filled with the subject, sender, date, category, and a link back to the message. + Remind — creates a reminder from the email; the reminder editor opens pre-filled so you just pick a time. ✓ Done — clears the email from your inbox once you’ve dealt with it.

The reading pane also has three actions that work directly on the message in Outlook:

🚩 Flag — flags or unflags the email in Outlook. The button shows the current state when the email opens, so it reads “Unflag” if the message is already flagged. Flagging leaves the email in your Smart Inbox — it’s marking it, not clearing it. Move to… — a dropdown of your Outlook folders (shown as a nested list); pick one to move the email into that folder. Moving does clear it from your Smart Inbox, since filing it away is a way of handling it.

Dismissing with Done doesn’t delete anything — it just tidies your view. A Show handled link at the bottom brings back everything you’ve cleared, and each of those has a Restore button if you want it back in the inbox.

Your Smart Inbox and Outlook stay in sync. When you clear an email with Done, Spark also marks it read in Outlook — so you’re not left with the same message showing as unread there. Restoring a handled email marks it unread again. It works the other way too: when you read an email directly in Outlook, Spark clears it from your Smart Inbox on its own, so you don’t have to deal with the same message twice. That clearing happens when you open or come back to Spark, and every couple of minutes while Spark is open, so give it a moment rather than expecting it the instant you read something in Outlook.

Inbox Tools

At the top of the Mail tab are two buttons for managing your inbox in bulk:

↻ Sync unread — pulls existing unread mail from your Outlook inbox into the Smart Inbox. Normally Spark only sees mail that arrives after you connect; this backfills what’s already sitting unread so the Smart Inbox reflects your real inbox. It tells you how many unread you have and pulls in up to 200 at a time — if you have more, just run it again for the next batch. The mail sorts into categories over the next few minutes in the background. Running it again is safe; anything already in Spark is skipped.

🗄 Archive read mail — moves every message in your Outlook inbox that you’ve already read into the Archive folder. Unread mail is left alone. It counts them and asks you to confirm the number first, so it’s never a surprise. For a big inbox it works in batches and offers to continue until it’s done. This is the tidy-up companion to Sync unread: pull the unread in to triage, archive the read to clear the clutter.

Inbox Cleanup (background sweep). For a really large backlog — the kind that’s too big to select and move by hand in Outlook — use Inbox Cleanup in Settings → Email. It archives all of your read mail in the background, steadily, over as long as it takes. Click Start cleanup, confirm the count, and a live counter shows how many read emails remain and how many have been archived. It keeps running even if you close Spark, so you can start it and walk away; it stops on its own when there’s no read mail left, and you can stop it manually anytime. As always, only read mail is moved — unread stays put — and archived mail lives safely in your Archive folder. Because a very large inbox is cleared gently to avoid overloading Outlook, expect it to work through a big backlog over a period of hours rather than all at once.

Urgent Alerts

At the top of the Mail tab is an Urgent alerts selector with three choices for how new urgent mail notifies you:

Off — no notification. Card — a pop-up in Spark (and a browser notification), but no sound. Card + Voice — the pop-up plus a spoken announcement, the same way Spark alerts you before meetings.

Pick whichever fits how much you want to be interrupted — “Card” is a good middle ground if voice announcements on every urgent email feel like too much. Only urgent mail ever triggers an alert; the other categories simply appear in your inbox.

15Quick Reference

Keyboard Shortcuts

Quick Capture Commands

Task Priority Colours

Task Status