[Mailman-Users] Banning members

[Mark Sapiro]

Martin Dennett wrote:

>I'm aware of the Mailman syntax for banning domains, but I'd like to ban 
>members now whose email address *starts* with a given string! I've had a 
>lot of requests lately from "debora" to join my list, always followed by 
>something else before the "@" and at various domains. I tried following 
>the format ^.*@004.com by using "debora^.*@*.*" but get an error when I 
>try to submit the changes. Where am I going wrong?


The '^' character in these expressions serves two purposes. As the
*initial* character, it tells Mailman that this is a regular
expression and not a literal address, and as part of the regular
expression, it matches the beginning of the string. Thus
"debora^.*@*.*" will be interpreted as a literal email address which
is invalid, thus the error. What you need is "^debora.*@.*\..*" or
more simply, just "^debora.*", or even "^debora". See
<http://docs.python.org/lib/re-syntax.html>.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan