We look after business websites, and for years the most common complaint we heard wasn’t about speed or design. It was spam. Contact forms full of link drops. Comment sections nobody wanted to moderate. “Your website isn’t on page one” emails every morning.

The tools we tried fell into two camps. Some put a puzzle in front of every visitor and hoped the bots would give up. Others filtered quietly in the background, which worked until the day a real customer’s inquiry vanished and nobody could say why.

We wanted something different, so we built Cayve.

Three ideas behind it

Never throw a real message away on a guess. Cayve gives every message one of three answers: allowed, held or blocked. When it isn’t confident, it holds the message for you instead of deleting it. For forms, the entry is saved and only the notification email waits; release it and the email goes out as if nothing happened.

Explain every decision. Each message gets a score from 0 to 100 and reasons written for people: “It contains 6 links”, “The email address can’t receive email”, “The same message was sent to 31 other websites in the last day”. Your developer gets the technical version of each reason alongside.

Ask nothing of your visitors. No boxes to check, no traffic lights to pick out. Cayve looks at the message, the sender and how the form was filled in, all on the server side.

How you start

Add your site, install the WordPress plugin and paste a key. Every comment, WooCommerce review and registration, and every form built with the popular form plugins is checked from then on. If you’re not on WordPress, the API does the same job from any app.

New sites start in shadow mode for a week: Cayve records what it would do and lets every message through, so you can judge it on your own traffic before it touches anything.

What’s next

We’re adding more integrations and making Cayve’s judgment sharper every week, with help from the corrections customers make. If there’s a form plugin or platform you’d like us to support, tell us. We read every message, and none of them go to spam.