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

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.”

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. Four 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.
• “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.
• 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. They are different systems that fail in ways users experience identically, and only the second is where Klar sits.

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.

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