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Your "Hire Me" button is a spam magnet. Let's fix it.
As an independent, your email is your lifeline. It's on your portfolio, your Contra profile, your socials. You need clients to find you.
But for every real lead, you get 10 spammers, 5 "SEO experts," and 3 phishing attempts disguised as overdue invoices.
I did the math. I was wasting ~70 hours a year just deleting junk. That’s two full billable weeks lost. If your rate is $100/hr, that's $7,000 flushed down the drain annually.
We built Sentry to stop the bleeding.
🛡️ Sentry is an AI Shield for legal & creative pros. It acts as a secure layer between your public contact info and your real inbox.
Interested to check out? More in the first comment!
How it helps independents:
Stop Context Switching: AI filters out the noise before it hits your inbox. You only see real opportunities.
Burnable Aliases: Create unique emails for specific platforms (e.g., contra.leads@your-alias.com ). If one gets spammed, you can kill it...
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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Your contact form works. The emails just never arrive.
This week a booking form on a client site sent its notifications with PHP mail(). The owner's Gmail sent them to spam, or dropped them.
Before you blame the form, check how the email is sent:
• SPF: a DNS record listing which servers may send for your domain
• DKIM: each email is signed, so the inbox can verify it came from you
• DMARC: tells inboxes what to do when SPF or DKIM fails
• Send from your own domain over SMTP or an email API, not the server's mail()
• Test with a real inbox, and check the spam folder too
Where do your site's form emails go: an inbox, a CRM, or both?
One real site, one real tip, every day. Follow for more videos.
More builds: youtube.com/@sellwrightstudio · instagram.com/sellwrightstudio
This one catches so many sites. Moving form notifications off PHP mail() to authenticated SMTP with proper SPF and DKIM fixes most of these cases.
$400K+ earned on Upwork. Now I'm starting from zero on Contra.
For years I worked almost only on Upwork. But lately, in my experience, it keeps adding new features that make life harder for freelancers instead of easier.
So I decided to try something new.
Honest status: no clients on Contra yet. I'm staying disciplined: showing up here every day and delivering for my current clients.
Attached is my Upwork profile, so you know where I'm coming from.
Which platform has brought you your best clients?
rip upwork?
A company messaged me today. I followed them 2 weeks ago.
Their automatic “welcome” arrived 14 days late, offered me a loan I never asked for, and had no idea who I was.
It isn’t a bad business. It’s a good business with a setup that quietly loses people.
I see the same 3 leaks again and again:
→ Someone enquires at 9pm, nobody replies until morning, and they’ve already messaged a competitor
→ Leads sit across DMs, email and WhatsApp, and nobody owns them
→ The owner only finds out a client left when the monthly numbers drop
Here’s how it should feel instead:
✅ Every enquiry gets a warm, human-sounding reply within seconds
✅ Every lead lands in one place, with their name, what they need and the next step
✅ Your team starts the day knowing exactly who to call
That’s what I build: websites that turn visitors into enquiries, CRM systems your team will actually use, and n8n workflows and AI agents that handle the follow-up, so you can focus on the clients in front of you.
Quick question: where do most of your enquiries come from right now? Instagram, your website, WhatsApp, or phone calls?
Comment below and I’ll tell you the first gap I’d fix, free.