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FastMail Forum All posts relating to FastMail.FM should go here: suggestions, comments, requests for help, complaints, technical issues etc. |
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9 Aug 2019, 08:52 AM | #16 |
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Without password protection, it would take a savvy passerby maybe 20 sec to edit an alias to forward a copy of all incoming mail to any address of their choosing, without you ever being the wiser.
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10 Aug 2019, 11:16 PM | #17 |
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11 Aug 2019, 04:21 PM | #18 |
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Interesting... The *84 idea does work, but d*.*2 does not. However *d.2 does.
Did you just experiment, or did you find a useful help page somewhere? |
11 Aug 2019, 05:33 PM | #19 |
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11 Aug 2019, 11:53 PM | #20 |
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It is worth remembering that some valid search strings will nevertheless end up with search failures, if there are many messages, as they time out. Search strings with multiple '*' are a good candidate for timeouts. They try to match as much text as possible, then need to backtrack when later parts of the search string do not match. This is computationally expensive.
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12 Aug 2019, 01:47 AM | #21 |
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> It is worth remembering...
This is not a discussion about searching messages, but instead one about using the search box on the Settings -> Users & Aliases screen of the FM webmail interface. FM seem to have replaced a simple substring search with a more complex one that does not find things easily. |
12 Aug 2019, 03:07 AM | #22 | |
The "e" in e-mail
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Quote:
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12 Aug 2019, 06:32 PM | #23 |
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> Regular expressions are, indeed, tricky if you are not used to them.
I think I am used to them. I'd noted before that they use POSIX Extended REs but when I tried to find that info again in their help system a few minutes ago I was surprised not to be able to. Searching in 'Help' for regex produced only 4 hits, all Sieve-related. See: https://www.fastmail.com/help/search/?q=regex Also, if searching the Users & Aliases page did allow regex one might expect \. to find a literal dot in an alias value, and it does not seem to. If on the other hand their normal message-search logic is in use, one would expect a value enclosed in quotes to work, and it doesn't. However it now works, it is much less useful than a filtered display where you're only shown those aliases whose values contain the literal characters you type in the search box. |
13 Aug 2019, 07:48 AM | #24 |
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It seems to be a simple glob, but anchored only on the left.
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13 Aug 2019, 05:33 PM | #25 | |
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Quote:
pz.df.qa.word.2784@domain the search will find things if it looks for some or all of any of the individual parts of that, so for example p or pz d or df q or qa w or wo or wor or word 2 or 27 or 278 or 2784 all filter the display in a sensible way. The problem seems to be that the search only looks at the characters between the dots AND it treats each 'word' as a separate entity. So a search for, for eg: wor works, even though that's a long way from being anchored at the left of the alias' value. That might as well have been implemented without any sort of wildcard use, as a simple "does the alias contain 'wor'?" test is enough to make that work, and is easy to understand. But a search for eg rd or ord does not work. It only works if you code eg *rd, and I think that that's satisfied not by logic that matches "*rd" against "pz.df.qa.word.2784@domain", but logic that maches it against "word" or maybe ".word". And compared with a simple subtring search that would find "f.q" easily, here you need something like "*f.q". And all that might be fine, if there was any help available that told anyone how this works... but there isn't. |
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13 Aug 2019, 10:32 PM | #26 |
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It does both as far as I can see. It match against the whole string or an individual 'word'.
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14 Aug 2019, 05:03 AM | #27 |
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14 Aug 2019, 04:46 PM | #28 | |
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Quote:
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14 Aug 2019, 05:24 PM | #29 |
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I've raised a ticket with FM, asking for their comments on this.
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14 Aug 2019, 05:27 PM | #30 | |
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Quote:
Whatever the OP used to do, it no longer works. But it did work, for them, in the past. |
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