The Spark Team 
Smart. Focused. Email.
Fast, cross-platform email designed to filter out the noise - so you can focus on what's important.
Definition
💡 Flagged email: A message you've marked to stand out from the rest of your inbox, so you can find it again without digging. Think of it as a sticky note on a specific email, visible only to you. Nobody else sees the flag. It doesn't move the email, doesn't notify the sender, doesn't do anything except make that one message easier for you to spot later.
What flagging an email actually does
A flagged email and an email flagged as spam sound similar. They're opposites.
Flagging an email as spam is a filter judging the message unwanted or dangerous and moving it out of your way. Flagging an email the way we're talking about here is you deciding a message matters and marking it so it doesn't get lost among forty others. One is a spam filter's call. The other is yours.
A flag also isn't the same as replying, archiving, or deleting. It sits quietly on top of whatever else happens to the message. And you can flag something, read it, reply to it, and still leave the flag on if you want it easy to find again next week.
Stars, flags, and pins: same idea, different names
You've got a few flavors of this depending on where you're reading email.
Gmail calls it a star. Click the star icon next to a message, or press S with the message selected, and it's marked. Starred messages get their own filtered view, so you don't have to scan your whole inbox to find them again.
Outlook calls it a flag. In Outlook.com, hover over a message to reveal the flag icon. In desktop Outlook, right-click a message and choose Follow Up to flag it, and you can even attach a reminder with a specific date and time so it resurfaces on its own.
Spark calls it a pin. Functionally, it's the same idea wearing a different name, whether you're coming from Gmail's stars or Outlook's flags.
Unlike Gmail stars or Outlook flags, though, Spark's pins sync across clients: pin something on your phone, and it's pinned when you open Spark on your desktop too. A dedicated Pins folder in the sidebar pulls together everything you've pinned from every folder except Trash, so you're not hunting through individual mailboxes to find what you marked.
How to flag an email
In Gmail:
- Hover over the message in your inbox.
- Click the star icon on the left.
- Find starred messages later under Starred in the left sidebar.
In Outlook (Outlook.com):
- Hover over the message.
- Select the flag icon that appears.
- View flagged items from the flagged messages filter at the bottom of the message list.
In Spark (desktop):
- Hover over the email (or open it) and click the pin icon.
- Select Pin.
Find pinned emails in the Pins folder in your sidebar, where they appear by default. You can also have pinned emails grouped right in your inbox view under Settings > Inbox > Email Groups, but that setting only controls display within the inbox itself and doesn't affect the Pins sidebar folder.
Menu names shift slightly across Outlook's classic desktop, new Outlook, and web versions, so if a step doesn't match what you see, Microsoft's flag-or-pin guide has the current version for your setup.
Making flags mean something again
Flag everything and you've built a second inbox. Just as unsorted as the first one. A few habits keep it useful.
Flag only what needs a second look, not everything mildly interesting. If you're flagging ten emails a day, you're not flagging. You're hoarding.
Clear flags on a schedule. Once a week, go through what's flagged and ask if it still needs to be there. If not, unflag it or actually deal with it.
And if you keep flagging the same kind of email hoping you'll "get to it," that's usually a sign you need a reminder with an actual date attached, not another flag sitting untouched in a pile.