Question

So my problem is I am looking to match a certain combination of letters at the start of an email address followed by an @ and then a wildcard, for example:

admin@* OR noreply@* OR spam@* OR subscribe@

Can this be done?

Answer 1

Try this

^(?:admin|noreply|spam|subscribe)@\S*

See it here on Regexr

You need an anchor at the start to avoid matching address with other characters before. If the string contains only the email address use ^ at the beginning, this matches the start of the string. If the email address is surrounded by other text, the use \b this is a word boundary.

(?:admin|noreply|spam|subscribe) is a non capturing group, becuase of the ?: at the start, then there is a list of alternatives, divided by the | character.

\S* is any amount of non white characters, this will match addresses that are not valid, but should not hurt too much.