I have a few throwaway email accounts one from gmail, one from yahoo and one from hotmail. I have no spam filters on any of them and get a lot of spam, which is the point of a throwaway account.
I do notice that on gmail all but two or three of the spam messages are in Chinese. (At least I think it’s Chinese writing, I guess it could be Korean or Japanese or something else).
I realize it costs virtually nothing to send spam, but since almost no one in America can read Chinese what’s the point. I mean AT LEAST in Spanish, I wouldn’t be able to read it but I’d recognize the letters. I can’t even to that, so this spam is really akin to jibberish.
Why the sudden increase and why bother at all? Even if I WANTED to answer it, I couldn’t.
There might not be a GQ answer to this (or rather, there probably IS, but unless you personally know the spammer, you’re not going to find out).
You’re receiving it simply because Gmail’s spam filters didn’t catch it. Maybe those messages are more difficult for Gmail’s filters to catch?
As to why the guy sent it to you in the first place, well, he probably doesn’t know or care that you’re in America and can’t read Chinese. You’re just one email address among a thousand or a million and he’s not going to waste his time weeding out the American-looking email addresses from his list. Like you said, it’s all the same to him – why would he limit himself to 10,000 Chinese email addresses when he can spam 1,000,000 addresses from all over the world for the same price? It’s worth it to him if just a few of those addresses respond.
And not all spam is sent for the purpose of getting you to buy something right away. Nowadays, some of it is deliberately sent to confuse filters to make spamming techniques more effective overall. If nothing else, now the spammer knows that your address works and he might even know that you bothered to open the message if any of the images loaded (which is why Gmail disables them by default, fortunately). Your address could then be added to a list of confirmed-working emails that he might sell to somebody else who might one day send you an ad for an American product that you might purchase… you might think that’s unlikely, but again, when he’s dealing with hundreds of thousands of people, only a few have to answer to make it worthwhile.