Quoting special chars

The procmailrc man page defines use of \. as:

     \.        Matches a single dot; use \ to quote  any  of  the
               magic characters to get rid of their special mean-
               ing.  See also $\ variable substitution.

Knowing I could use this in the shell, I tested it sending mail to myself.
This suggests to me that any mailing list could have its addresses
written this way to prevent any possible mismatch if same lists are used
as accept lists as I did in my previous post.  Is this true?
Thanks.

Dave Robbins