
Adam McGreggor writes:
Or could we meet user expectations (real users, not geeks), [and allow glob syntax].
Definitely worth discussing, but my initial reaction is negative for the reasons discussed below.
Simples: *@mail.ru *@*mail.ru ?????@mail.ru
Are those anchored? At the beginning of string? At end? Is there really a use case for "?"? I don't see this as an obvious feature. Globs are also too blunt for the use case, especially since bad actors do deliberately use fine distinctions between well-known domains and their own sinkholes of depravity when phishing. Users are likely to be lazy, using "*@*mail.ru" to catch both "badactor@mail.ru" and "badactor@spamsource.mail.ru", trashing "niceguy@goodmail.ru"'s posts in the process.
Off the top of my head, the syntax would define if it's an absolute address (foo@example.com) vs a regexp.
"foo@example.com" is unambiguous, but "foo+mailman@example.com" is not. That's a big trap for users, who surely know exactly what they mean by that (and it's not foooooooooooomailman@example.com!)
In theory we could use globs as well (some of the modern VCSes permit glob or regexp syntax), but it's not a serious data loss issue for a VCS if a mistake is made. You just run the add command again with -f, or uncommit, or whatever. Granted, a perverse enough user could fail to add a file, commit, then overwrite the file, but this is much less serious than the possibility that a particular user would end up as collateral damage to a spam filter.
Steve