On Mailman-Users, Mark Sapiro writes: > Further, in the ban_list (and many other places in Mailman) if an > address is intended to be a regular expression pattern, it must begin > with '^', so you really want > > ^.*@domain\.com$ > > to match any_addr...@domain.com.
I hope we haven't propagated this rather user-unfriendly interface (the convention of accepting both regexps and literals, distinguishing by "^" in column 0) to Mailman 3. Even as a Python programmer, I find Mark's post somewhat confusing: I would design filters using re.search, so that the above would actually be equivalent as a Python regular expression to r"@domain\.com$". OTOH, if the implementation uses re.match, the "^" is redundant, so I have a "say what?!" event. If we have, I propose changing it to Ban these addresses, one entry per line: [ ] [ ] Entries are regular expressions. or something like that. We also ought to have a "Python features for Mailman administrators" section of the FAQ, starting with "what is a regular expression", and giving examples of how to accomplish common tasks like banning a whole domain with regular expressions. Typical regexp FAQs are hard for non-programmers (and even beginning programmers) to grasp. I don't have time to actually work on these now, but if there's uptake on the suggestion ("let's think about it" at +0 or above :-) I'll file issues. _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9