title: How to detect if a period is at the beginning of a string?
body: <p>I have this query that pulls email addresses from our DB.  There is a lot of junk data, so I only want to see valid email addresses.  Here is my syntax:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    SELECT DISTINCT Email
  FROM         dbo.Customers
  WHERE     (Email IS NOT NULL) 
  AND (Email LIKE '%@%') 
  AND (RIGHT(Email, 4) IN ('.net', '.com', '.org')) 
  AND (Email NOT LIKE '%@UniformCity.com') 
  AND (Email NOT LIKE '%@LifeUniform.com') 
  AND (RIGHT(RTRIM(Email), 1) &lt;&gt; '.') AND (LEFT(LTRIM(Email), 1) &lt;&gt; '@')  --first character not @
  AND (Email not Like '%[`:;_*-,()+%\/=#-]%') order by Email
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to detect periods at the beginning of the email.  Also as a bonus, how can I tell my like statement to look for "[" without screwing it up?</p>