What people say about Apple Mail spam filtering

We say across this site that Apple Mail leaves a gap worth filling. Coming from a company that sells a spam filter, that is a self-serving thing to claim, so this page hands over the sources instead. Everything below is a screenshot of a public thread, with a link back to the original beside it. Read them and judge for yourself.

Junk that lands in the inbox

That is the failure everyone pictures when they think about spam. It is also the cheaper of the two, because you see it happen and you can deal with it. The other direction costs more and shows less.

Wanted mail that lands in Junk

A Mac user on r/macapps said the same about the Mail app itself, in 2022, on a thread about which email client to use: “I have both real messages frequently going to junk and bad spam messages going to the Inbox. I’ve even added SpamSieve and it’s just a mess. I have to skim my junk mail daily to make sure I’m not missing some important message.”

The silent kind

Silent is the word that matters. Nobody checks the Junk folder daily, so a filter that files the wrong message does not cost you the minute it takes to move it back. It costs you the login you could not complete, or the invoice you answered late. A commenter on another thread put the sharpest version of it: “Their spam filter is rubbish. Even emails sent between members of the same family sharing group go to spam in spite of never leaving Apple’s own infrastructure.”

Reddit has the version where the message never arrives at all. On r/iCloud, in a thread asking whether to stay on iCloud Mail: “It is emails that Apple silently filters where they never reach your mailbox at all, not even the junk folder. My experience was that I had tickets to a show at a Chicago Theatre. They rescheduled the show, sent an email out to ticket holders, and I never received the email and didn’t know it was rescheduled.”

Then there is the version where the cost lands on someone else. From a thread about a spouse’s reply being filed as junk: “I have one client who now texts me every time she sends an email to make sure I got it. Annoying for her and embarrassing for me.”

What this page does not prove

A page of complaints is evidence that a question keeps being asked. It is not a measurement, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. Five limits, stated plainly:

• A support forum is where unhappy people go. Nobody posts a thread to report that their junk folder is working, so the sample is selected by definition. Reddit is the same sample with a vote count attached, and some of the threads here have a comment defending Apple’s filter a few lines below the one we quote.
• “Me too” counts how many people found a thread and recognised it. It is a popularity signal, not an incidence rate, and no denominator exists anywhere on that page.
• We chose these threads, and we sell a competing product. The links are there so you can search the same forum yourself and see what an unfiltered pass turns up. One of them, the r/MacOS thread, has a reply from our own account further down recommending Klar. The screenshot stops at the original post, and the link shows the whole thread.
• Apple filters mail in two different places: iCloud does it server-side, before delivery, and the Mail app has its own junk filter on the Mac. Several of the quotes above describe the iCloud side, and everything from r/iCloud does by definition. They are different systems that fail in ways users experience identically, and only the second is where Klar sits.
• Three of the Reddit comments come from threads whose original post has since been deleted, by its author or with their account. The comments stand on their own and are still public, but the question they answered is gone.

Where Klar fits

Klar is a Mail extension, so it reads each message as it arrives on your Mac and files it before you ever see it. It runs a modern language model rather than a word list, which is the part that matters for scams written to read like real mail, and the classification happens on your machine rather than on a server. If you want the settings side first, we wrote up what Apple Mail’s own junk filter can and cannot be told to do, and there is a comparison with SpamSieve, the long-standing local option on the Mac. What is left once the spam is in Junk is on the quiet page: an inbox with nothing to delete.

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