[Mailman-Users] ban_list example?

[Richard Barrett]

On Monday, October 13, 2003, at 06:28  pm, Scott Lambert wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 11:31:57AM -0500, Skip Montanaro wrote:
>>
>>     David> I tried ...
>>
>>     David> joe at abc.com
>>     David> ^*@xyz.com
>>
>>     David> ... but got an invalid value error.
>>
>> Try
>>
>>     ^.*@xyz.com
>
> Not knowing anything about mailman's use of these values:
>
> The "^.*something" regex is equivalent to just "something".
>
> "^.*" is useless, confusing and should never be used in a regex for the
> regex libraries with which I am familiar.
>

The regex says, and will only be true if:

^   match at start of email address string
.*  match any string i.e.any alias
@   match a following @ character
xyz.com match a given mail domain. Actually, this would be better as 
xyz\.com so that a literal period was matched rather than any character 
between the xyz and com substrings matching.

So what is wrong with that.

Personally I would have said the following to tighten up the 
specification but that is just my prejudices:

^[^@]+ at xyz\.com$

> -- 
> Scott Lambert
> lambert at lambertfam.org