All of the information that has been requested has been provided, but this topic has gotten big enough that some of the earlier replies have been forgotten.
An earlier reply
the addresses in my protect list are like: some*!*@*
therefore the information in the protect list is stored in the format of <nick>*!*@* with the nick having a wildcard following it, and both the ident and host portions of the address being wildcarded, in contrast to the absolute return by $address(<nick>,5)
mIRC doesn't have a $address mask that matches that format, so I used the $+ concatenator to make an address format that matches the format in the list.
