I’m starting to get a flow of junk email coming from a sender using a couple of letters I don’t recognize. It’s a lower-case y with an umlaut, then a lower case p where the post extends above and below the round part, then an upper case V,Q,Z, and 1 just in today’s inbox. The subject lines are the same two first letters followed by V,G,T, and I, respectively. All these 3-letter groups.
The body of the mail is ordinary junk, pitching ink cartridges, Quicken Loans, Gold Trust scams, and the like.
The use of the odd letters makes it look more toxic than the usual spam, but I’m curious about the letters.
The only modern language that uses it AFAIK is Icelandic.
The y with an umlaut might be an ij digraph. It is used in Dutch and a few related languages. But I suspect you’re simply getting some font encoding issue.
I didn’t want to copy the letters to my post, because I thought it would come out wrong in others’ computers that lacked that font. Sometimes I do get font encoding issues, such as an apparent apostrophe showing up in an email as a Yen symbol in somebody’s email.
If you’re using windows, it’s got a handy utility called the character map. It shows pictures of all the characters it knows that you can select and then copy for pasting into a forum.
It’s based on the unicode character set, so it should be universal.
Here’s your lower-case y with umlaut: ÿ
an odd-looking lower-case p: ƥ
I poked around in there a bit and found these fun ones:
here’s an e on a display stand: ȩ
some boobs (or, possibly, buttcheeks): Ѿ
punctuation made specifically for “what the …” moments: ‽
That last one is called an interrobang and was a fad in the 70’s, according to the BBC show QI.
Sounds like what you’re getting is just ordinary spam run through some sort of software that replaces letters with similar looking but rare characters from the unicode set. The idea is that your spam filter will recognize and filter out “penis enlarger” but won’t recognize something like “þêñï§ êñlårgêr”.
It is almost certainly this, but if you want to absolutely verify that it is not text, copy-paste it into https://translate.google.com/ with “Detect Language” selected and see if it comes up with something.
That’s a Polish nasalized e sound. In Polish, it’s called an e with a “tail” (ogonek). There is also an “a” version with a tail. What’s particularly annoying is that Apple products, at least, when you hold down a key, it gives you versions of that letter with diacrytics or other variants. If I hold down “e”, the last option I get is “ę” with the ogonek. But if I hold down the “a”, there is no option for an “a” with the tail. As far as I know, Polish, Lithuanian, and (looks it up) Dalecarlian are the only language that use ę, but they all use the “a” with the tail as well!. Why would you include the “ę” in your letter variants but not the – hold on, let me find a place to cut and paste it from – “ą”. It’s bloody annoying, especially as recently it was pączki day, and I wanted to spell it correctly, but had to go hunting on my phone to cut-and-paste it from another web page. (It’s not that big a deal due to context, but paczki and pączki are two different words in Polish. The former means “packages.” The latter means a type of (usually) jelly-filled donut, though it does not have to be jelly-filled. In my case, I was writing a post that actually did need the ą.)
On leahcim’s advice, I ran ÿþ2 through Google translate, and it said Vietnamese detected. That may or may not give me the sender’s location. The actual addresses are a variety of sorta-English words followed by .us .