The Junk E-mail Reporting Tool submits e-mail to Microsoft when you explicitly choose to do so. If you receive a junk e-mail and want to report it to us for analysis, first select the e-mail in. An independent writer who has reviewed hundreds of email programs and services since 1997. The Mail application that ships with macOS and OS X is solid, feature-rich and spam-eliminating software that is also an easy-to-use email client. Optimized to work on the Mac, the Mail app is trouble free.

Before we get started

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

The spam filters in Mail already work pretty well at keeping out unsolicited junk mail from your precious inbox, but there are times when you might want some added protection. There’s nothing more annoying than receiving hundreds of mails that you didn’t ask for (imagine if your postbox at home was deluged in the same way!), so check out some of the spam plug-ins and proxies we’ve described that are available for the Mac. It’s worth remembering that Mail’s built-in junk mail filters are supposed to become more accurate over time, especially if you regularly help it by marking emails as junk or not junk.

We’ve also included several email proxies in this list (because there are surprisingly few actual spam filter plug-ins for Mail) – these are applications which receive mail directly from your email server and provide their own advanced filtering. Mail simply then connects to the proxy rather than the real mail server – so they can be thought of as a kind of intermediate filter system that sits between the mail server and the Mail app.

1. SpamSieve

Details:SpamSieve website

Spam Tool For Mac Email Programs

Price: $30

SpamSieve’s main attraction is that it learns to intelligently filter spam by learning your email habits. Therefore it can block most junk mail successfully whilst allowing legitimate messages to come through to your inbox. You can whitelist any contacts so they’re never added to the spam folder, and also create your own rules and filters.

2. POPFile

Details:POPFile website

Price: FREE

POPFile isn’t strictly a Mail plug-in either, as it runs on your machine between Mail and your email server. It’s accessed through the web browser, and automatically filter emails based on specific rules that you give it. As such, it’s a very useful accompaniment to Mail, and lets you assign mails to any number of different buckets such as Personal, Spam, Fun, and Work. Over time it becomes more intelligent, and is able to quarantine specific messages or perform custom operations on those messages.

3. Spamfire

Details:Spamfire website

Price: $39.95

Spamfire is yet another “intelligent” spam filter which requires a little bit of initial training, but after which quickly learns which messages are junk. Again, it’s not really a Mail plugin but it does automatically configure Mail to download the messages that Spamfire has already processed. The filters let you decide what to do with emails – such as good emails, borderline good emails, probable spam and definite spam. For example, you might decide to delete spam messages immediately, or for borderline cases hold them until you’ve had a chance to classify them as junk or not.

Here’s an example of the user interface, which also has a rather unique and interesting feature built-in – to spam the spammers!

One consideration that you should be aware of is that the Spamfire developers claim free email services such as Google Mail provide spam filtering which is just as good, if not better than, applications such as this. So even though they will happily accept payment for the software, they concede that you might be just as satisfied with another solution. Honesty is always welcome!

4. Spamato

Details: Spamato on Sourceforge

Price: FREE

Spamato is also an email proxy which sits between your real email server and your Mac’s Mail application. It’s got loads of options, and promises to filter out the majority of unwanted mail. There is no standalone user interface, but it can be accessed and configured simply through your web browser. Here’s an example of the Spamato user interface.

Spam Tool For Mac Emails

5. Personal Antispam

Details:Intego website

Price: $79.95

Personal Antispam is actually a subset of Intego’s Internet Security Barrier X6 product, and as such there’s also a lot of other features contained within the package. Just like many of the other products we’ve covered, it learns your email habits and classifies messages based on content, whitelists, blacklists, and any other custom rules you can think of.

Configuring the filtering rules is simple – just create a new rule and edit its properties as shown below.

6. SpamBayes

Details: SpamBayes on SourceForge

Price: FREE

SpamBayes classifies incoming email messages either as ‘spam’, ‘ham’ (which is good, non-spam email) or ‘unsure’. It first needs to be trained by the user to identify spam and ham, after which it’s able to classify new messages with a high degree of confidence. You can send ham goes straight through to Mail, spam to a folder that you can ignore, and the unsure messages to another folder which you can review later.

If your email provider doesn't already filter spam at the source—most large commercial providers do—you'll benefit from having an anti-spam solution installed on your Mac. Several vendors offer a mix of paid and free software solutions that will help you tame the beast of unsolicited commercial email.

SpamSieve

SpamSieve lets you add superior Bayesian spam filtering to Mac OS X email clients. It's just as easy to use as Mail's junk-mail filters and can give you statistics, too.

SpamSweep

SpamSweep successfully combines high-precision spam filtering with a simple and easy to use interface. It's a pity processing mail is a tad slow in SpamSweep, and a POP proxy mode would be nice.

POPFile

POPFile is a powerful and flexible email classification POP and NNTP proxy that you can use to filter spam efficiently and categorize good mail automatically. However, POPFile can grow a bit heavy on memory and CPU load if you have trained on lots of mail.

Spamfence

Spamfence is an effortless but highly effective spam and virus filtering service. Its only real shortcoming is that Spamfence relies on forwarding and requires two different email accounts.

Spamfire

Spamfire combines efficient Bayesian filtering and ease-of-use to form a great anti-spam tool. It could integrate with email clients even better, though, and be a bit snappier overall.

Spamato

Spamato filters POP and IMAP accounts for spam with the potential for high-precision and plug-ins that make it easy to use in Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. Unfortunately, Spamato can be a bit overwhelming with its multitude of options and little help.

Personal Antispam X5

Personal Antispam X5 employs a number of tactics to rid Mac OS X Mail and Entourage of spam—a bit overeagerly, unfortunately.

SpamBayes - Mac Spam Filter

SpamBayes employs sophisticated analysis using Bayesian statistics to rid your email Inbox of junk mail precisely and in an effortless manner.

It would be great if SpamBayes' classifying power could be used to further categorize and prioritize good messages, and plug-ins for programs other than Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird would be welcome.

Anti-spam tools that run on your Mac can be good, but if you have the chance, use the anti-spam features offered by your email provider. Not only will server-based filtering prove less taxing to your computer's resources, but the anti-spam settings will persist when you check your email on a different computer.