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Wildcards provide you with the ability to specify a range of email addresses (or other values) using just one character, and is highly useful when setting up filters or blocks. The asterisk symbol (*) is analogous to saying "any number of any character", and will be familiar to anyone who has used command-line interfaces with Unix or DOS systems.

Examples

If you want to block any emails which come from a hotmail account, instead of manually setting up thousands of blocks, you can simply set up one with the following value:

*@hotmail.com

If you wanted to catch variations of a certain name, and filter them all into the same folder (eg: brian@domain.com and bryan@domain.com), you could apply the following filter to the envelope recipient:

br*an@domain.com

If you wished to avoid promotional emails from a given company, and the emails arrived from various domains (eg: sales@company.com or sales@company.co.uk or sales@company.uk.com, you could apply the following block:

sales@company.*

Or to cover more possibilities - *@company.*

Wildcard checks can also be applied to the body of a message. If you wanted to identify any emails which contain phrases common to spam emails (eg: Win a free holiday or For just £1.99 a month, you could own your own biplane), you could enter the following blocks:

win a free *
for just * you could * your own *