I notice that within the Filter Sidebar, the Friends List and the Blacklist both use wildcard expressions but the Filters use regular expressions for text string pattern matching.

It would be sure nice if everything in the Filter Sidebar used the same form and format for string expressions. By this, I mean focus in onto the more powerful of the two, and go with simply Regular Expressions for everything.

Am I the only one who likes consistancy and would support such a suggestion?

I agree. It makes it harder to learn the more powerful expressions if they don't work are aren't the same for both.

Probably overkill for the black and friends lists, a couple *'s are a lot easier to deal with than regex.

What type of expression could you add to the blacklist that you can't add as a filter?

Well, I was trying to be fancy, and write a single blacklist entry which will tag all foreign (to the USA) domains.

Some examples would be:
spamer@aol.com.mx
junk@hotmail.com.ru
porn@free.cm.fi

I could write a regular expression which will look for exactly two characters following a second dot after the at-sign. Can that be done with wildcards and be certain it would not trap something like mom@home.us ??

Also, now that I had to learn Regular Expressions, I want to use them.

Maybe *.?? would if you added *.us to the friends list but that would tag too many domains friendly.

Why don't you just use the filter function for this? Gary has one that looks to fit the bill, second form the end of the list and he has the country codes a bit farther down so you can customize it to fit your needs if you aren't a US resident.

http://www.w5hq.com/MailWasher/MailWasherFilters.txt

The blacklist has a place but complex filtering isn't what it was intended for.

Thanks for that denn988 my experience with the internet hasn't expanded to where I understand the workings of (RIPE), (APNIC), (LACNIC) but your posting makes me want to look into it. I know there are other threads on the subject. As it is now I would be held prisoner until someone else updated the filters for me.

It would be cool if there were just a forum for MailWasher Filter threads and that way every past posting could be in one area under one roof. Not to be done I know but it would help.

Just close MWP, add this to filters.txt, save the file, and reopen MWP.

I can't begin to translate it but if you browse or search the filter threads you will find links to websites that might help if you do want to understand.