Throwing it as-is into a simple bayesian filter works great too - nobody honest writes fun&zwsp;ding.

MS and the other big buggers are pretty incapable of running an email system that you would really want to use. They also have to support those that you might consider spammers too.

However, I'm sure that you are also familiar with the HN standard issue meme that it is impossible to run your own email system.

So, your email provider is crap and you can't do it yourself!

Bollocks! I use Exim (1) and rspamd (2) and run quite a few bijou email systems. It does require some effort.

You pays your money and you makes your choice ...

1. https://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/in... 2. https://docs.rspamd.com/

Do you have any evidence they didn't?

My suspicion is that the spam filter programmers didn't do a comprehensive evaluation of every code point on every plane of Unicode because... well that's a massive job. So your "sanitize and denormalize" tasks are actually massive mappings which were likely imperfectly created.