Does anyone else get emails with headers which look as though they are in Greek or else meaningless symbols. Perhaps it is code - I don't open them, but wondered if anyone knows what these are?

I *think* that spammers use gibberish in headers to bypass the various mail filters. My Mailwasher programme regularly picks these up and marks them as spam.

You are doing the correct thing by deleting them without opening- you cannot be too careful these days.

I've been getting this sort of thing in the last week or two. I've also been deleting them without opening.

This page might help you, it says that these symbols are in fact Korean:

http://www.uwm.edu/IMT/purchase/itpsfaqs/koreanspam.html

I get about 10 a day for cheap viagra etc. all with umlauts, acute, grave, cedillas, and other assorted accents above the letters, the reason being as already said, to bypass the word-blocking request. I encourage everyone to click on a finance email and fill in their online form with nonsense, enough of these may eventually discourage them.

There does seem to be more of an effort by the spammers to get past filters by sticking symbols or numbers in the subject. The permutations of what sort they can use and where they can be placed in the wording must be limitless. You can bet the combination of words and symbols will change every couple of days too, which renders ineffective any filters that are set up to detect words in the subject line.

I think this is where 'Bayesian' method of filtering scores. Nothing much seems to get past that, regardless of how spammers mess up the subject line. It all gets marked as spam and is automatically dumped where it belongs ...in the trash bin.

The only trouble is that you still find yourself checking the junk just in case the filter has made a mistake and deleted something it shouldn't have. If that does happen (which is rare) the e-mail can be marked as 'not junk' and the filter won't delete it next time.

I'm getting mail with a return address of, let's say, ronald followed by my correct mail address. My Mailwasher checker picks it up as spam and deletes it; problem is that it deletes my address from my friends list so I can't send a cc of an e-mail to myself without having it deleted.
I'm waiting on a reply from Mailwasher on how to fix this.

The latest Latest Version of Mailwasher (3.3.0) was released on 5th November. I wonder if upgrading might cure the problem you have.