Filter String text for a Mailbox Rule is not working as expected

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

When trying to use wild card characters such as an asterisk '*' to represent a match on any character, they do not seem to match was expected.

If I use the same search string when searching tickets or via SQL, it pulls back results, but does not work when sending in an email to Service Desk. It does not match up to the rule as expected.

For example, using the following as a Filter String:

*Incident*Create

does not match when emails are sent in with subject lines like the following:

FW: Incident_Create 
RE:IncidentCreate 
Incident-Create 
Incident Create

Environment

Release: All Releases
Component:  CA Service Desk Manager

Cause

The Filter String on Mailbox Rules uses regex which is a language used to match string patterns.  

Resolution

For example an asterisk will perform a match on 0 or more of the preceding characters.
In this case, the following regex when used as a Filter String on the mailbox rule would find a match.

[ \n\t]*incident[_- ]*create[_- ]*[ \n\t]*

should match these patterns:

FW: Incident_Create 
RE:IncidentCreate 
Incident-Create 
Incident Create

Here are some commonly used regex characters:

? The question mark indicates there is zero or one of the preceding element. For example, colou?r matches both "color" and "colour".

* The asterisk indicates there is zero or more of the preceding element. For example, ab*c matches "ac", "abc", "abbc", "abbbc", and so on.

+ The plus sign indicates there is one or more of the preceding element. For example, ab+c matches "abc", "abbc", "abbbc", and so on, but not "ac".

[ ] A bracket expression. Matches a single character that is contained within the brackets. For example, [abc] matches "a", "b", or "c". [a-z] specifies a range which matches any lowercase letter from "a" to "z". These forms can be mixed: [abcx-z] matches "a", "b", "c", "x", "y", or "z", as does [a-cx-z].

The - character is treated as a literal character if it is the last or the first (after the ^) character within the brackets: [abc-], [-abc]. Note that backslash escapes are not allowed. The ] character can be included in a bracket expression if it is the first (after the ^) character: []abc].

[ \t\n\v\f] Whitespace characters

Additional Information

Enable maileater tracing (KB Article 98428) to review how regex is being used to process a mail rule.