Reply to post:

The only call I ever got from one of those is one I missed - it just came up on the phone's missed call list.

What I do get from time to time is SEO spam in my Hotmail spam bin - that and phishing scams pretending to be from Outlook etc are the only ones that the Outlook filters let through. Occasionally I've delved into the Hotmail junk folder and sent replies to the usual amazing business propositions written as an out of office response and giving them the SEO address. After all, they're all in the same line of business so surely they'd appreciate the introductions.

Other responses are to ask them for the URL of the site they're sure they can improve because otherwise I can't tell which of my many(!) sites it is. Oddly they never respond. Another, bearing in mind that they're probably very proud of their English* is to reply pointing out how badly written their email is and I doubt that if this is the best they can do they couldn't be trusted with a site.

More recently I've taken to pointing out that if they're able to get first page in Google their own site must be on the first page if I search for "first page in Google" in Google but they seem to have omitted its URL so I can see for myself and what's more it's odd that they're using a gmail address rather than their own domain. Usually, of course they can't reply because their long established company - whose name they also managed to omit - is just a single chancer without a domain let alone a web site.

But then I got a reply from a different name. I realised the spammers are just taking any responses and selling on the leads. The reply came from a real business based in India but with branches in the UK (Streetview finds it above a "language school" in a shop-front in Longsight) and Australia, presumably the owner's cousins, brothers-in-law or whatever. He included a number of reference sites to I wrote back pointing out the errors in the UK examples: bad copy ranging from poor English to complete nonsense, over-dependence on Javascript and news items that broke off in mid-sentence - even mid-word. I've not heard back but I wonder if his Mancunian cousin got a bollocking for slack work.

*I wonder, however, if they've bought the text of the email along with the spam list.