Hello, this is my first post so bear with me. I made a quick search through the forum and found nothing, so any feedback is appreciated.

Recently I have been studying spam using regular expressions in a mail proxy called SpamPal to cleanly divide each message into folders that best describe their characteristics. I feel I grasp the basics of the language well but I'm still struggling with lookaheads and lookarounds and the like.

I need to match any mutation of a word. but not the actual word itself.
For this case, I'd like an expression that avoids matching 'watch' but matches 'w@tch', 'watches', 'w_a:tch', 'w@+<h35', etc..

One final note - SpamPal's Perl engine does not support backreferencing, so please avoid using it in a solution if possible. Everything else is intact, however.

Thank you in advance.  ~Sean