Lol!!

[Brian Turner]

I received an e-mail from a company claiming to be in poverty and struggling for survival in Bangladesh, and unable to pay the directory fees for listing:

We are a Bangladeshi Web Design Company and struggling for the
survivable in this business for last few years. As you know, Bangladesh
is one of the Most POOR countries in the world but still we are (a
group of intelligent students) putting all of our efforts to establish
a creative service based business. We are working 18 hours in a day and
desperately straggling for our existence in “Web Design” Market by
ensuring the headrest customer support.

Since poverty engulfs our daily life, we can’t effort to pay the
Listing charges to add our website at your esteemed directory. We are
praying your honest help [consideration] to save our business.

This is very funny, because I do offer free listings on the directory.

Also, I think it's damned unprofessional for any company to claim to be too poor to make a free listing.

What they come across as doing is having never even read the directory submission itself, and instead, simply used a bot to harvest e-mails of directories - in order to get the directory owners to submit the link themselves.

A cynic I am, perhaps, but I really don't see how a human user can't see there's a free listing option for general review in the directory.

[TWD-Tony]

Brian - I have holes in my shoes, can I have a site-wide banner ad please

Seriously though... that has got to be the first time I have seen a begging letter for ad space! In a business such as web design, image is one of the most important things - the "we are skint" approach is probably the worst way to introduce yourself that I have ever heard of

[Brian Turner]

Indeed - but when already offered for free?! That's why I highlighted the e-mail - ridiculous.

[Brian Turner]

Okay, it's a general spam e-mail - I just received 27 copies of the e-mail, send to a range of random e-mail addresses based on my domains.

They never even looked at the directory listing page - they're just e-mail spamming any domain that has a directory on it.

[Gary]

Interesting e-mail, I particularly like the way it quilts the reader into submission.

I don't think this is the best way to approach directory listings, they can't of had much success.