How to Disable the Junk Filter in Mail for Mac

Mail for Mac includes an optional Junk mail filter, which attempts to filter out and isolate spam messages so that they don’t clutter your email inbox. The junk filter can be helpful for some users, but it can also be overzealous from time to time, and you may find yourself with erroneously flagged emails appearing in the Junk inbox when they should be in the regular email inbox. A simple solution to this problem is to disable the junk mail filter in Mail for Mac.

Whether or not you want to disable the junk filter on Mail for Mac is up to you and how much spam or garbage email you get in general. Keep in mind that most ISPs and mail providers have some degree of server-side spam filtering for their email accounts, and so having an additional local client-side spam filter for email is not always necessary. For example, if you use Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail, each of those services has separate spam filtering that will occur before the email messages will even arrive to your local computer, assuming those email accounts are added to Mail app on the Mac.

How to Turn Off Junk Filtering in Mail for Mac

1. Open Mail on the Mac if you have not done so already, then pull down the “Mail” menu and choose “Preferences”
2. Select the “Junk Mail” tab in Preferences
3. Uncheck the box for “Enable junk mail filtering”



4. Close Preferences, then, optionally but recommended, go to the Junk inbox and move or remove any emails that should not belong in the junk folder

Your junk mail inbox should be empty when finished, and emails should no longer arrive and be marked as junk by the Mail app in Mac OS.

One decent strategy for managing junk email is to use multiple email accounts for different purposes. For example, you could create an iCloud.com email account and use that email address exclusively to sign up for online shopping or other similar activity, but have a separate email for personal communications and important information, and a separate email for work. Granted, managing multiple email accounts is a bit more advanced, but it can be helpful in many situations, just be sure to set the default email address if you go that route. You can always delete an email account from the computer if you later decide it’s too much of a hassle.

Remember, you can always re-enable the junk filtering in Mail for Mac again by returning to the preferences and adjusting the junk filter as suited to your needs. So if you try this out and find that you end up with a lot of garbage in your inbox, it’s just as easy to turn junk filtering back on again.