Filtering Recipients with Wildcard

[Brett]

I am trying to exclude email recipients whose email addresses start with a 2 or a 3. When I add the rule From: *, To: 2*, or From: *, To: 3*, It filters out all emails and stops archiving. Should I be using a different approach than using a wildcard after the first character?

[Janos SUTO]

Remove the ‘From: *’ reference, and try again.

[Brett]

I still get the same result when I leave the From field blank, it stops archiving any emails. Seems like the issue is when I use a Wildcard after a character. I have rules with Wildcards before the email domain and those rules work as expected.

[Janos SUTO]

Use the pilertest utility to test your rules and emails. Take 2 emails: one matching to this rule (ie. having a recipient with 3* address), and another with perhaps 4*. Then run pilertest on them. It will print how the parser sees the message, and reveal the matching rule if there’s any.

[Janos SUTO]

No news is good news.

[Brett]

I couldn’t ever get this to work. It seems like there might be a 5 character minimum for this, because if I did “xxxxx*” (where the x’s are the first 5 characters of a particular email address) then it would work. But in my case I am needing to filter all recipient emails beginning with a 2 or 3, from being archived.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

[Janos SUTO]

Did you set such an archiving rule to exclude those emails from being archived?

[Brett]

Correct, and I have several other rules that work just fine. But when I do 3* or 2* for recipient, nothing gets archived.

[Janos SUTO]

Please show me two messages with full headers: one that should be archived and one that should not, but the rule catches it.

[Brett]

Looks like I found a solution. In our case, we have email addresses that start with two digits, that should not be archived (Ex. 22******@******.net or 30******@******.net). Whenever I use a wildcard * , if my rules ends with a wildcard everything gets filtered from being archived. In my case, since we have two digits at the beginning of these email addresses I did the following, *0, *1, *2, *3, *4, *5, *6, *7, *8, *9, for the Recipient Field and a * for the From Field and this covers the emails that I needed excluded from archiving. As mentioned before using 2*, or 3*, would filter everything out, so you may want to look into that. But in our case this workaround resolved our issues. Thank you for your help.