Argh!
Now I can understand my Portuguese spam (and so I don't immediately mark it as spam and delete it, because it has more intrinsic interest, and it's no longer immediately obvious from the language whether it's spam or not).
As Thomas Schelling suggests in The Strategy of Conflict, sometimes being able to understand something (or being able to receive messages, or being seen as rational) can be a real disadvantage. When you can understand, people can use language to try to deceive you, threaten you, propagandize you, annoy you, or simply waste your time. In the famous case of a threat, if you really plausibly don't understand the threat, for any reason whatsoever, the threat's effectiveness fails. If spammers could be sure that I didn't know any Portuguese, they would have no reason to spam me in Portuguese (and, if they did, I would have no reason to pay attention to their messages).
I get a lot of Korean spam, too, but I never have any doubt whether it's spam, and I'm never even tempted to try to read it -- let alone risking falling for some kind of scam or pitch conveyed in Korean.
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