On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Charlie Watts writes:
>
> > Additionally, because maildrop does regular expression matching, there are
> > many, many other characters that ought to be escaped - principle of least
> > surprise. Some of my users have been caught when regexes like 'u.k.'
> > matched text that they didn't expect.
>
> Actually, the pattern field is intended to be a regexp - sqwebmail will
> check for obvious syntax errors -- such as mismatched parenthesis, etc...
Right - but almost nobody knows what a regular expression -is-. You don't
run into regular expressions outside of nice editors and programming
languages; Not in the wild woolly Internet.
Having that feature is nice - but it's also awfully complicated. I expect
I'm not the only one with users who won't understand "You have to put a
backslash in front of the period, parens, brackets, plus, asterisk - oh,
and the backslash itself.". And that's leaving a bunch of them out.
I know that this is your project - I hate to feel whiney. I'm not much of
a coder ... for now I guess I'll just add a comment and link to some help
and explanation text.
--
Charlie Watts
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Frontier Internet
http://www.frontier.net/
