At 22:23 2004-11-15 +0100, Travel Jadoo wrote:
I do get quite occasionally some incorrect matches. How could this be
possible?
A poor understanding of regexps.
Initially I had a .*SPAM* which I refined to .[SPAM* which is simply to
filter out and forward spam detected by spamassassin to me for
verification.
. * and [ (as well as various other symbols) are all special characters for
regexp. If you expect to use them as literal symbols, you need to escape them.
* ^Subject:.[SPAM*
is a BROKEN expression. The dot means any one character. The open bracket
means start a character class, and SPAM* are characters within that
class. The regexp even manages to fail to CLOSE the character class.
If you're looking to match [SPAM] at the beginning of the subject line,
then use a condition line like so:
* ^Subject:[ ]*\[SPAM\]
Note the brackets around SPAM are escaped, which sheds them of their
special regexp meaning. The bracketed space before that is a space and tab.
If this is tagging inserted locally, you might check to see if there are
other headers inserted (X-Spam-Status: or similar), instead of relying upon
the subject line.
procmail: Match on "^Subject:.[SPAM*"
Subject: Photos from last Friday's cruise
Subject: followed by any one character (being a space in this case),
followed by one of the characters in the class S, P, A, M, * (P in this case).
procmail: Match on "^Subject:.*SPAM*"
Subject: RE: Request for Spare Parts
This broken expression says match for Subject: followed by any number of
any symbol (in this case " RE: Request for ", and then SPA, and optionally
M (the * following M means ZERO or more). "Spa"re Parts meets this criteria.
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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