Using regular expressions in permission rules
 

Warning - DigiPortal Software does not provide technical support on this topic and all requests will be quietly ignored. The information in this document is provided as-is and intended only as a starting point for advanced users familiar with the concepts described below.

ChoiceMail One supports the use of regular expressions to specify match conditions in permission rules. An explanation of regular expressions is beyond the scope of this document but you can search for the phrase using your normal search engine to find more information on this topic. A particularly interesting website is http://www.regexlib.com/ which contains many examples of regular expressions. Microsoft also has an excellent regular expression tutorial on their website.

To use a regular expression instead of simple text, start the line with the sequence
(regex)
Everything immediately following that sequence will be treated as the regular expression.


Example:
(regex)(?i)v[i|1]agra

  • (?i) A switch that means that the match is not case-sensitive
  • [i|1] matches either the letter i or the number 1

So the expression above will match viagra, v1agra, ViAgRa, and so forth.



Example:

(regex)(?i)</html>[\s]*(<.*>)*?[a-zA-Z0-9]+

Placed in the BODY section of a permission rule, this expression does the following:

  1. (?i) A switch that means that the match is not case-sensitive
  2. </html> Looks for the normal end tag of an HTML document ,followed immediately by
  3. [\s]* Any number of blank spaces, followed immediately by
  4. (<.*>)*? An arbitrary number of characters (including none), followed by
  5. [a-zA-Z0-9]+ At least one alphanumeric character. The uppercase range A-Z is not actually necessary due to the (?i) switch but is good practice since the switch is not always used.
Comment: a properly formed HTML document should never have characters after the final </html> tag. Spammers often insert random characters (different in every message) so that server-based filtering system will not recognize the messages as spam (filter systems often presume that if the identical message is received many times, then it's highly likely to be spam).


See also
Transform rules
ChoiceMail One User's Guide



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