I still love Perl for simply getting stuff done!

I still love Perl for simply getting stuff done!

My email provider is turning off catch-all email addresses on Monday, and just allowing automatic name+string@example.com forwarding to name@example.com instead. They also allow you to bulk-edit a manual list of forwarding addresses.

For as long as I’ve owned chrisdolan.net, I’ve been using chris.foo@ instead of chris+foo@ as my pattern for throwaway email addresses. Gotta fix all those. Should I go to every website and try to change my email address? You’ve got to be kidding…

So, Perl to the rescue! I grepped through my many gigabytes of email folders and password files pulling out every string that matched .*@chrisdolan.net and then wrote a whole bunch of filters to remove spurious prefixes and de-duplicate the results. That led to a final list of roughly 400 email addresses that I added to my host’s forwarding list. Grand total, 45 lines of code and a handful of commandlines.

I should probably whittle the forwarding list further by hand (like digg@ — I haven’t used Digg in a reeeeally long time) but no urgency.