Overview

What it does

JunkGate frees your enquiries from spam and scams, so your contact form brings you work rather than junk.

The problem

Your inbox is well defended. Your contact form is a side door.

A form submission is not sent by the person who filled it in. It is sent by your own web server, from your own domain, to your own inbox. Your mail provider sees a sender it already trusts, so the filtering that would have stopped the identical words arriving from a stranger never runs on them at all.

That is the whole reason a business with excellent email security still finds its contact form full of junk. The envelope is genuinely yours, so nothing about the sender is going to save you, and the customer who did want to buy something is somewhere in the pile.

A bulk pitch wastes your morning. These three take money out of the business, and each one arrives as a single well-written enquiry from a real mailbox, which is exactly the shape a spam filter has no opinion about.

Overpayment fraud

A large order placed sight unseen, paid by cheque or transfer for more than the total, with a request to forward the difference to a shipping agent. The payment is reversed days later. The money you forwarded is real, and it is gone.

Supplier and staff impersonation

A message presenting itself as a supplier, a courier, or somebody inside your own business, asking you to update bank details, confirm an account, or open an attachment. It uses names it has no business knowing, which is what makes it work.

Advance-fee approaches

A large contract, tender or payout that needs one small thing from you first: a registration fee, a deposit, a certificate, a document. The small thing is the entire purpose of the message.

Why the usual defences miss all three

ApproachWhat it stopsWhat still gets through
A CAPTCHA
tests the visitor
Scripts and simple bots. Every scam a person typed. Plus some of your real customers, who give up on the puzzle and you never learn which ones.
Blocklists and reputation
tests where it came from
Addresses and networks somebody has already reported. A fresh address, a free mailbox, or a genuine account somebody else has taken over. Every one of those has a clean reputation.
Keyword rules
tests the words used
Junk that happens to use the words on the list. The same pitch worded differently. And it holds your real customer, the one whose enquiry mentioned an invoice.
JunkGate
protects the enquiries that pay you
Bulk pitches and the frauds above, including the ones a person wrote by hand, from a clean address, in careful words. Kept out of your inbox rather than deleted. Junk that reads exactly like a customer. That is the mistake we would rather make, every time, and it costs you a moment rather than a sale.

Three enquiries, and what happened to them

Ours, not a customer’s. Here is what went in, and here is what came back.

Hello, I want to place a large order with your company. I am not particular about the specification, whatever you have available in stock will be fine. My finance officer will send a cheque for the full amount plus an additional sum, and you can pay the difference to my shipping agent when he comes to collect the goods.

JunkGate would keep this out of your inbox.

Nothing is deleted. It waits where you can see it, and one click sends it to you.

Hi there, I was reviewing your website and noticed it is not ranking on the first page for your main keywords. Our team can build 500 high authority backlinks every month and we guarantee first page placement within 90 days. Shall I send over our packages and pricing?

JunkGate would keep this out of your inbox.

Nothing is deleted. It waits where you can see it, and one click sends it to you.

Hi, do you work on Fords? I have a 2014 Focus and the clutch is slipping badly when I pull away in first, worse once the engine is warm. I am about ten minutes up the road from you. Could you give me a rough idea what a replacement would cost, and when you could take a look at it?

Delivered, and flagged as one to answer first.

Straight about what these are: we wrote these messages and sent them through the live system ourselves, and the outcomes are exactly what came back. They are not customer traffic, because there are no customers yet. When there are, we still will not reprint their enquiries here.

What the box on the front page is, exactly. It handles one message on its own, and nothing you paste there is attached to a site, an account or any record of a decision. On your own site it starts by watching and holds nothing.

Watch-only comes first

A new site starts in watch-only mode, and this is not a trial limitation. It is how you find out whether JunkGate is safe on your traffic before it is allowed to act on it.

In watch-only, every message is delivered exactly as it is today. The dashboard fills up with what JunkGate would have done. When it has seen enough of your traffic without once flagging a real customer, you can switch it on.

The bar to switch on is zero mistakes, not few. If a genuine enquiry on your site would have been wrongly held even once, it stays in watch-only until that is fixed.

How you stay in charge

The whole control loop, and there is no step in it we take on your behalf.

  1. Watch. Every enquiry lands in your dashboard with what would have happened to it. Nothing is held yet.
  2. Switch protection on when it looks right on your own traffic. You do this, not us, and not a default.
  3. Review what was kept out. It waits in the dashboard. It is never deleted by JunkGate, only by the retention clock.
  4. Release anything in one click. The original notification goes out again, exactly as it was written.
  5. Mark junk that got through. JunkGate takes that correction into account on your site from then on.

The install guide covers the same loop from the dashboard side. Read the install guide.

What happens to an enquiry

OutcomeWhat it means for you
delivered It reaches you, flagged as one to answer first.
not certain It reaches you anyway. Doubt resolves in the sender’s favour, every time.
kept out It never reaches your inbox. Nothing is deleted, and one click sends it to you.

If anything goes wrong, your enquiries still arrive

Genuine enquiries are never silently lost. If JunkGate is ever unsure, or ever unavailable, your messages are delivered, and the dashboard says plainly that is what happened. Something that can cost you a customer when it fails is worse than nothing at all, so it is built to fail in the only direction that is safe.

Kept current

What gets stopped moves when the scams move.

Scam tradecraft does not sit still, so neither does JunkGate. The reading behind that work is published in full rather than described in a sentence. Read the research library.

The two notes beside this are the part worth knowing whether or not you ever use JunkGate: the two habits most people still rely on to spot a scam have both stopped working, and both of them now point the wrong way.

Bad spelling no longer means spam

The overwhelming majority of scam messages are now written or polished by AI: fluent, correctly punctuated, properly formatted. Meanwhile your real customer types on a phone between jobs and produces exactly the sloppy, half-punctuated message the old filters flagged. Judging by the writing now has it precisely backwards.

Naming your business proves nothing either

Attackers scrape a site and personalise at scale, so a message that names your suburb, your owner or a service you offer can be produced for thousands of businesses at once. A personalised enquiry is not proof of a customer, and a scrappy one is not proof of a scam.

The mistake that matters

One of the two mistakes costs you a sale. The other costs you a moment.

Everything about this product is arranged around which of them it would rather make.

The mistakeWhat it costs youWhat bounds it
A real enquiry wrongly kept out A customer contacted you and heard nothing back. They decide you ignored them and go elsewhere, and you never find out it happened. This is the failure the entire product is arranged around. Nothing is deleted. It waits in your dashboard and releases in one click, verbatim. The bar for letting JunkGate act on your site at all is zero of these, not few.
Junk that got through You read a sales pitch you did not want, and you delete it. That is the whole cost, and it is why this is the error we would rather make, every time. Mark it as junk in one click. JunkGate takes that correction into account on your site from then on, so the same pitch does not need marking twice.
We will not quote you a single accuracy percentage. One number hides the mistake that costs you money inside the mistake that costs you a moment, and a figure averaged across other people’s websites tells you nothing about yours. We have none to publish and would not publish one if we had it. What you get instead is the box on the front page, your own junk in it, and then your own traffic in watch-only before anything is allowed to act.

What you can hold us to

Nothing is silently lost
Genuine enquiries reach you. If JunkGate is ever unsure, or ever unavailable, your messages are delivered, and the dashboard says so plainly.
Watch first
Every new site starts in watch-only and holds nothing at all. Your dashboard fills with what JunkGate would have done, on your own traffic, and you switch protection on yourself. Not us, and not a default.
One-click release
Nothing kept out is ever lost. It waits in your dashboard, and one click re-sends the original notification exactly as it was written.
Nothing is deleted by us
A decision never deletes a message. Only the retention clock does, on the same schedule for everything, whether it reached you or not.
Your call always wins
Release anything, mark anything, switch it off entirely. Every one of those is one click from your own dashboard and none of them needs us.
No CAPTCHA
Your customers fill in your form and press send, exactly as they do today. They never see JunkGate and never prove anything to anyone.

Ready to see your own traffic?

Watching only, free, nothing held.

Free plan, forever, no card. Nothing is held until you switch protection on.