Some contact form messages are obviously junk. The hard ones look almost real: polite, addressed to your business, with a name and a reply-to address. Here’s what Cayve looks at, and what you can look for yourself.

Signs of an SEO or marketing pitch

  • It’s about your website, not your business. “Your site isn’t ranking on the first page.” “I noticed some errors on your homepage.”
  • It offers something free to start. A free audit, a free report, a free mockup.
  • It asks you to reply somewhere else. A different email address or a messaging app instead of the one in the form.
  • It ends with an opt-out line. “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” is how mass mailings end, not personal inquiries.

Cayve files these as SEO outreach and, by default, holds them for you. Some businesses do want to hear from marketers; most don’t. You choose in the site’s rules.

Signs of a scam

  • Urgency about an account or a payment. “Your domain will expire today.” “Invoice overdue.”
  • Links that hide where they go, such as link shorteners.
  • Look-alike letters, where a Cyrillic “о” stands in for a Latin “o” to dodge filters.

Cayve blocks scams by default, but only when it’s confident.

Signs of a bot

These are invisible in the email but obvious to Cayve:

  • Sent in two seconds. Faster than anyone can read and fill in a form.
  • A hidden field was filled in. Forms protected by Cayve include a field people can’t see. Bots fill in everything.
  • No form token. The message was posted straight to your server without your page ever loading.
  • A phone number that can’t exist, like a US area code starting with 0 or 1.
  • The same message on dozens of other sites in the same day.

Signs of a real person

  • It’s specific. Quantities, dates, places, a product name.
  • It reads like they found you, not like they found a list.
  • The email address works. Its domain has a mail server, and it isn’t a throwaway service.
  • It took a while to write. People pause, correct, and take a minute or two.

When it’s a sales pitch

Not every pitch is spam. Someone offering a service you might need is a real person, and sometimes a lead. That’s why Cayve labels these sales pitch separately and lets them through by default.

Every decision Cayve makes lists the signs it found in plain English, so you can check its reasoning in seconds.