Hints , or possibly elbow in ribs needed on parsing a Subject: header to grab the complete string Three (I hope) Subject variations : "foo.com, bar.net, blah.org, trivial.com"; "foo.com, bar.net, blah.org & trivial.com"; "foo.com, bar.net, blah.org and trivial.com"; prints only the first domain, much to my annoyance. #### my ($first, $second, $third, $fourth) = (/^([\w.-]+((,\s?)|(\s&\s)|(\sand\s)|$))+/) #### my @topics = split(/(?:,|\s*&|\s*and)\s*/)