The Village Spammer
by Brian Hayes
Published 16 May 2009
In recent weeks my junk-mail folder has received well over 100 copies of the folksy image reproduced above. I don’t read Russian, but I know just enough of the alphabet to sound out the second word of the headline. My русскоговорящего friend Dana MacKenzie kindly translated the rest of the message:
Village Spammer
The era of posters and announcements has passed. We will distribute your ad on the Internet.
As Dana points out, this is spam for spammers: metaspam. There’s a lot of that going around. After all, the entire online economy is supported by advertisements for companies supported by advertisements for companies supported by….
Incidentally, the painting that the spammers defaced is “Village Postman,” 1959, by Pyotr Krokhonyatkin. I identified it by guessing the title and running a query through Simple Image Search, which led me here.
While I’m on the subject of spam, here’s an update to my running tally of monthly receipts:
For March and April combined, 57 percent of my spam was in Russian (or some other language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet).
Responses from readers:
Please note: The bit-player website is no longer equipped to accept and publish comments from readers, but the author is still eager to hear from you. Send comments, criticism, compliments, or corrections to brian@bit-player.org.
Publication history
First publication: 16 May 2009
Converted to Eleventy framework: 22 April 2025
I too received such main but i just ignore it.