Trusted vs Exclusive

[theq]

1. Is there any difference between the way Trusted and Exclusive Senders work, apart from one being global and the other attributed to a specific SG address?

2. Can one specify more than 2 Exclusive Senders?

3. Is the proper format for Exclusive Senders: "Exclusive1@Sender.com|Exclusive2@Sender.com" - no spaces around the pipe (and no quotes, of course)?

TIA!

[crazycomputers]

1. Is there any difference between the way Trusted and Exclusive Senders work, apart from one being global and the other attributed to a specific SG address?

No. That sums it up perfectly.

2. Can one specify more than 2 Exclusive Senders?

No. You can, however, specify a whole domain instead of a specific address. E.g. instead of "Exclusive1@Sender.com" just put "Sender.com". You can also put the disposable address itself in the exclusive sender field, in which case the address will never shut off, no matter who is sending to that address. (Careful with that, though... if someone sends you a couple hundred messages in one day, you're going to feel it.)

You can also use a domain as a trusted sender.

3. Is the proper format for Exclusive Senders: "Exclusive1@Sender.com|Exclusive2@Sender.com" - no spaces around the pipe (and no quotes, of course)?

No. You can't specify more than one exclusive sender.

[Guest]

You can't specify more than one exclusive sender.

Huh - I was under the impression you could at least get two with the pipe ("|") workaround. That's not the case?

Thanks, regardless!

[DyNama]

2. Can one specify more than 2 Exclusive Senders?

No.

which implies you can specify 2, but then

No. You can't specify more than one exclusive sender.

but i have entered as many as 3, separated by commas: 2 domains and 1 email address--mine, as a test to see if multiple exclusive senders would work--and the test email did get thru, so i decided it did work.

another poster in another topic referred to "multiple exclusive senders" and it seems to work (unless i havent noticed that i'm no longer getting email from either exclusive sender!) as soon as the test msg came thru, i removed my email addy, but i still have 2 sg addys with 2 exclusive senders separated by a comma.

[josh]

There are a couple of subtle differences between trusted and exclusive senders, besides being global and specific to an address.

Trusted senders use "domain-style" matching, in that 'example.com' matches 'example.com', and 'host1.example.com', and 'host2.example.com', but 'host1.example.com' doesn't match 'example.com' or 'host2.example.com'.

Exclusive senders use regular expression matching (with support for special regex characters like '.' and '|'. Support for multiple exclusive senders was an unintended side effect of this -- you can supply more than one match pattern by delimiting with the pipe character ('|'), which is an 'or' operator in regular expressions.

[crazycomputers]

Hmm... interesting.

So that means that when I specify "example.com" as an exclusive sender, "domain.example.com.com" would get through, as well as "example1com.com"? Should I be escaping metacharacters?

Does this mean that ".*" would do pretty much the same thing as specifying the disposable itself in the exclusive sender (e.g. everyone can get through)?

[josh]

yes -- if the all-matching wildcard is used too much, we might have to rethink that, though, because we don't have the resources to handle too much of it.

[DyNama]

whew, you lost me on

domain.example.com.com

tho i must admit i don't know much about regular expression.

a further test convinced me that commas don't work all the time--but they did work some of the time--so i replaced them with | pipes.

i'm glad to know i can have multiple exclusive senders because i do sometimes reuse a disposable address.

[xoxo]

I love using SG for mail from ebay.com itself, but to trash email from others that sucked my addr from ebay. My prob is that ebay uses several domains for different types of msgs. (Similiar prob: other companies often will use another domain for their newsletters, etc. (e.g. yahoo.com -> yahoo-inc.com)

I loved this thread hearing that regexp's are in exclusive sender.
How extensive is it? E.G. Will *ebay*.com work as I might want?

[josh]

no, but simply

ebay

probably will

[crazycomputers]

For a disposable that you use for such sensitive information, it may be worth your while to put the disposable itself in the exclusive sender field -- this will allow anyone to send to the disposable without decreasing the message count. I do this for my PayPal and eBay addresses to insure that any important messages get through. If someone starts spamming on one of the addresses, I can just change my email address to another disposable and disable the old one.

As far as regular expressions, *ebay*.com will not work, because it's not a valid regular expression. .*ebay.*\.com would probably do what you want, but as josh said, just ebay will be the easiest way to do this.

Keep in mind that item sellers/buyers may use this address to contact you, so you don't want to limit it to eBay's domains, or you may miss an important question from another eBay user.

[alan]

I think it would be good to have the option for an address to have more than one "exclusive" sender (despite the name), an obvious use being to allow a company which sends emails from more than one domain.

This would remove the temptation to include regexp terms which are expensive to evaluate, which you may have to disable later (and if wildcards are just used in situations that are really needed, then hopefully there should be less need to disable them).

It would also be more intuitive for users. I know that SG users probably have above average clue, but this thread shows that still not everyone knows about regexp syntax.

(P.S. if you really wanted a complete wildcard exclusive sender, but wanted a cheaper regexp to evaluate than ".*", then remember that it doesn't have to match the whole string. For example, "@" would do. Or even use something like "^", which a quick test with a perl script suggests is actually cheaper than an empty regexp!)

[alan]

Or even use something like "^", which a quick test with a perl script suggests is actually cheaper than an empty regexp!

Sorry, I'll take that back. It actually works out slightly more expensive than the empty regexp by the time you put it into a variable and evaluate e.g. /$regexp/ rather than hard-coding /^/ into the script. But still -- in a test just now, the time for a single evaluation of /$regexp/ was about 450ns faster for '^' than for '.*' on a 1GHz Pentium 3, using a string of length 23 characters. Not a lot, but I guess it all adds up.

[josh]

how about just . (instead of .*)?

Since you can currently use the pipe operator ( | ) for an OR operation, eg, example.com|example.org instead of using multiple entries, we'd want to evaluate the expensiveness of that against the expensiveness of adding more database fields or tables (and pulling data from them).

[SkiToDie]

Does the exclusive sender still support regex strings? If it does, then I'm having some trouble getting it to work.

Here's one example from my addresses that is not working. For Myspace, they use *@myspace.com and *@message.myspace.com. I've tried:
myspace.com
myspace\.com
myspace.com|message.myspace.com
myspace\.com|message\.myspace\.com
and a few other variations, but each email still decreases the message count. I am currently using
(myspace.com)|(message.myspace.com)
but I haven't received an email yet, so I don't know if that works. In any case, if regex is still supported, I would expect myspace.com to allow email from both domains, right?

Any answers, or suggestions? I have several other addresses that use multiple domains, and I'd really like to get this working so that I don't have to keep logging in to reset my message counts. Thanks.