ORF supports two ways to define email address masks: wildcard expressions and regular expressions. This help section describes the usage of wildcard expressions.
Wildcards allow you to define simple email address masks easily, without learning the relatively complex regular expression syntax. Wildcards are special characters which match any characters, for a specified number of times (the latter criteria depends on the wildcard). ORF supports two wildcard characters:
| Wildcard | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| * | Matches zero or more arbitrary characters. | *@example.org |
| ? | Matches zero or one arbitrary character. | a?c@example.org |
| Expression | Matches | Does not match |
|---|---|---|
| *@example.org | joe@example.org, rita@example.org | joe@example.net, vamsoft@vamsoft.com |
| jo*@example.org | jo@example.org, joe@example.org, joanna@example.org | jim@example.org, rita@example.org |
| joe@*.com | joe@example.net, joe@mail.anotherdomain.com | joe@example.org |
| ac*@*.com | acquire@somedomain.com, accounting@mail.anotherdomain.com | ads@somedomain.com |
| n?c@example.org | noc@example.org, nc@example.org, nic@example.org | nick@example.org |
Regular expressions allow defining more complex matching criteria, though this comes with a price of a bit more complicated syntax. See the Regular Expressions in ORF help topic for more information about regular expressions.