A private alternative to SpamHero

What to check before you connect SpamHero

It filters the domain, not the mailbox

SpamHero sits in front of your mail server: you point the domain's MX records at it, and it delivers what survives filtering. That requires control of the domain's DNS, so it is not an option for an @gmail.com, @icloud.com or employer address. Klar starts from the other end. It is an Apple Mail extension, so it classifies whatever already arrives in Mail, on any account, and changes nothing in DNS.

Which law your mail sits under

SpamHero is a service of iSparks, inc., of Pleasant Grove, Utah. A gateway has to read a message to score it, so mail for your domain is processed in the United States. Its privacy policy covers European transfers with standard contractual clauses, names EU and UK representatives, and says client data will not be used to train general-purpose AI models. Klar is built in France and the question stops earlier: your mail is classified on your Mac and never leaves it, so there is no transfer to put a safeguard around.

22 million rules, or one model

SpamHero's feature list leads with over 22 million filter rules and more than 100 million senders tracked. That is the gateway approach working as designed: a central feed that somebody has to keep current, because rules and sender reputation go stale as fast as spam is rewritten. Klar has no rules and no sender lists to sync. Its classifier was trained on the shape of a message, so a payment demand from a stranger reads the same to it in English, French or German, misspelled, or phrased in a way nobody has sent before. Nothing has to arrive daily for it to keep working, and with Klar Plus your corrections retrain the model on your own Mac instead of feeding a shared list.

What the price is per, and what it counts

SpamHero charges per domain with unlimited addresses, which is the cheap way to cover a company: the entry tier is $5/month on a first prepaid year, $84/year after that, or $8/month billed monthly, and there are four tiers up to $99/month. What it does count is messages. The entry plan includes 25,000 inbound messages and 7 days of archiving, and more capacity is $5/month per 100,000. Klar counts nothing: no message quota, no overage, no per-mailbox tally, no limit on how much mail you put through it, because there is no server in the path to meter.