Gwabbit, an e-mail utility that's designed to simplify contact management, has been available to BlackBerry since May for a subscription of $9.99/year. Today, a free version became available on the BlackBerry App World.

Gwabbit employs a patent-pending semantic technology to identify contact blocks within e-mail text and parse and import them into your address book. So there's no more cutting and pasting contacts one field at a time from your messages into your BlackBerry. For those users syncing to Outlook, the software's automated capture is designed to keep contacts updated globally.

The free version of gwabbit is the same as the paid edition except it also includes a new alerting feature that informs contacts via e-mail when their contact information has been added to a friend or colleague’s address book using gwabbit. This service is said to be valuable for sales and business development. So-called "gwabbees” can opt-out of the gwabbit alert service if they prefer not to stay current on who has added them to their address book.

“The fact that gwabbit for BlackBerry has been the #1 paid productivity application on BlackBerry App World for 12 consecutive weeks is a tremendous validation of the value we are bringing to mobile users,” said gwabbit president and founder Todd Miller in a statement. “In these cost-conscious times, a free version of gwabbit is the perfect solution for users who are looking to leverage free software.”

It also gives the company away to promote itself to “gwabbees’ whose signatures have been automatically grabbed from an e-mail message and inserted into a user’s address book. Some of these may become users of the free edition of gwabbit as well, while others may could well become paying customers.

Gwabbit is compatible with BlackBerry OS 4.2 and higher. Learn more about both the paid and free versions of gwabbit here at the BlackBerry App World.