I agree, Spark’s image handling is terrible. Mailplane works well with images.
Although Mimestream’s image handling isn’t great either, I’ve been using it for a while because I found Spark just too problematic in a couple of important ways.
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My address is hosted at Gmail, but I want everything to come from and go to ace@tidbits.com (which works through easyDNS’s easyMail service). Spark lets you set a default address, but for certain messages, such as those from mailing lists or BCCs, replies get sent using the Gmail address, not the one I set. This annoyed me to no end, and even now, I’m getting a lot more mail from people who saw my Gmail address when they weren’t supposed to. Plus, some mailing list posts failed because they didn’t come from my subscribed address.
(Mimestream handles this perfectly—you set a default address and it’s used for everything, end of story.)
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My preferred style of working is to mark messages I want to come back to as unread. It’s what works for me. Spark supports it just fine, but it’s all too easy to leave a message selected in between sessions, come back, and switch to another message, inadvertently marking the first one as read and having it disappear instantly. I lost a possible TidBITS sponsorship that way, since the message I needed to reply disappeared on me and by the time I’d remembered and found it again a few days later, the window had closed.
(Mimestream works much better here. Read messages will disappear if you have the filter set to hide them, but it doesn’t hide anything until you move away from a mailbox. So even if you forget to mark something as unread right away, it won’t disappear until you navigate away from the mailbox, rather than when you navigate away from the message.)