What is the purpose of these weird non-spam emails?
This is spam -- but possibly the spammer was not very good at spamming.
The '=EA' bits are Quoted-Printable, an encoding for bytes into ASCII characters. '=EA=85=9F' thus stands for bytes of values 0xEA, 0x85 and 0x9F, in that order; this is the UTF-8 encoding for 'ꅟ' (that's U+A15F YI SYLLABLE NDEX, one of the symbols of Yi script). Whoever sent that email hopes that your mail reader software will not include a Yi font, and thus display the character as a space.
The point of using such symbols is to try to confuse antispam filters: the filter may try to react on the sentence "It's xxx by the way" (for random names instead of "xxx"); the extra characters may make this filter fail. Chances are that the spam, being sent by the million, will use random characters from unusual sets (like Yi glyphs). The random words ("fiddle", "armpits"...) serve the same purpose: to evade detection, especially by Bayesian spam filters. Note that the extra words are "hidden" in the HTML view, by being displayed with a very small font and with the same colour as the background.
All of this is very spammish, and since your spam filter let the mail flow, then the spammer actually won this round: his evasive maneuvers worked, and your spam filter was defeated.
Now, what can be the point of all this ? The point of spam is to trigger some reaction from the spammee. This can be "clicking on a link" but it could also be "send an email in response". I can make several conjectures:
It has been pointed out (e.g. in this study) that the business model of most spammers requires pinpointing stupid people. For the spammer, sending out millions of spams costs about nothing; however, when a spammee answers, a human agent of the spammer must read and respond, and there things become very expensive for the spammer. Thus, what the spammer really wants is that the few people who actually get hooked on the initial spam will be ready to believe the most fantasmagorical stories.
Along that hypothesis, the spam you received might be a way to find the people who are dumb enough to believe that the sender is really named Shawn, and are ready to talk to Shawn.
Spammers are (technically) human beings, with all the flaws that this entails. The spammer uses a spamming tool but may be bad at using it. I often receive spams that greet me as "Hello %RANDUSER", an occurrence that can only be explained by a spammer who should be reading the documentation for his spamming tool.
This email is most definitely spam (unless you know the sender and/or solicited this mail). Those odd strings are obfuscation techniques, which are a telltale sign of spam. See Tom Leek's answer for more information on that.
There are three possible explanations for this email:
- It's an attempt to get you to respond; threads build psychological trust and can better set up scams
- It is an attempt at messing up your filters (e.g. Bayesian poisoning ... which doesn't work)
- The spammer messed up and forgot the payload
I'm leaning on it being both #1 and #2.
(Nice fonts in there! font-family: Unfeignedly, Gascony, Pancakes, great fodder for a good Bayesian tokenizer to pick up on.)