A web marketing and development company based in Osaka, Japan has released a tool designed to address what it describes as an increasingly significant operational burden for small business owners: automated spam submitted through website contact forms.
MUTE, developed by Ryu-Raku Inc., launched globally on April 20, 2026. The service was distributed through EIN Presswire on launch day and was picked up by AP News alongside more than 200 media outlets across the United States.
The problem the tool addresses
Contact form spam has grown alongside the rise of AI-powered outreach tools, which allow automated sales pitches to be generated and submitted at scale. Unlike email spam, which is subject to filtering and legal restrictions in many countries, form-based submissions occupy a legal grey area and arrive directly in business inboxes.
Masahiro Matsuzaki, Representative Director of Ryu-Raku Inc., said the issue had become a recurring concern among the small and mid-sized business clients his firm has served for more than two decades.
“Contact forms exist for customers — not for unsolicited sales pitches. MUTE restores that channel to the people who actually matter,” said Matsuzaki.
Industry estimates suggest that some businesses receive upwards of 200 automated pitches per month through contact forms alone. Beyond the time cost of manually reviewing and deleting these submissions, consistently high spam volumes can degrade a domain’s email deliverability over time, potentially causing legitimate correspondence to be flagged as junk.
How the service works
MUTE operates by embedding a hidden field within a contact form via a single JavaScript tag. Automated submission tools, which attempt to populate all available fields, are identified by their interaction with this invisible element and blocked before their submissions reach the business inbox.
A secondary layer monitors timing and behavioral patterns to detect sophisticated bots designed to mimic human interaction. The entire process is invisible to legitimate website visitors and requires no changes to a site’s existing backend infrastructure.
The service runs on a stateless, serverless architecture, meaning each submission check is processed independently with no persistent server-side connection. Detection logic runs server-side and cannot be accessed or bypassed through client-facing browser tools.
Availability
MUTE is available globally. New accounts include a 14-day evaluation period with no payment information required at signup. Annual pricing is $39.96 per website.
