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Thanks to Jeff and Era for taking the time to answer my perhaps too simple
question. Since I'm on a roll and think I 'get it' for the most part just
one more ( if / when someone has time )
Era says:
In this particular case, you should probably write
* ^From:(.*\<)?foo(_at_)fizz\(_dot_)terra\(_dot_)net\>
Now here at the end-- does the \> do something special besides matching an
literal > at the end of the mail-- that is will it still match the
terra\.net even if there is no > at the end ( that is will \.terra\.net\>
match still match terra.net as _well_ as terra.net>?)
and ( all these characters just make me zone at
times ):
with the: (.*\<)? doesn't the ? match 0 or 1 occurences of anything in the
()? if so how does that work with the (.*) characters since .*
means 0 or more occurences of any character? Don't the .* and the ?
contradict each other since the ? applies to anything in the ()?
or even something still better constrained if you want to be
absolutely 100% sure there will never be any accidental mismatches.
(\< and \> are problematic because they can validly match characters
which can be part of an e-mail address. The above would still match on
bar-foo(_at_)(_dot_)(_dot_)(_dot_) or ...terra.net.org.)
That is what confuses me. I thought a \.terra\.net\> would match
terra.net followed immediately by a > thus excluding something like the
terra.net.org that you mentioned above.
I need to go back and re-study everything ( including regexes ) . I think
the problem is you can 'get away with' bad recipes in procmail so easily
that 'seem to work' for so long that it doesn't neccesarily make you learn
everything properly in the first place in order to use it ( overall )
effectively. Sometimes I wish there was an 'error-checking' feature like
Perl has with 'use strict' and -w so I could keep myself out of the
doghouse.:-) Thanks everyone for your time and I appreciate your patience. :-)
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