Based on your example, if you want to match a nick contained in $2 then your wildcard match would be like $read(Docs\email.txt, ntw, $+($2,=,*))
Reminder that with $read you should always use the nt switches unless you specifically intend to evaluate $identifier and %var strings which might be contained in the text file, or intend that a numeric line#1 be handled as if it's the true number of remaining lines in the text file.
