more general hooks to handle similar mailing lists

[Claus Assmann]

I'm trying to use a more generic approach for some patterns
to handle mailing list, e.g., something like:

save-hook "~C ietf-\\([a-z0-9]+\\)@ietf.org" =%1

instead of having one entry for each mailing list.
Is that possible with the current mutt features?

It seems that back-references in regular expressions can only
be used for "spam":
spam pattern format
...
format can be any static text, but it also can include back-references
from the pattern expression.

If that's the case, would it be useful to extend it to other (all) uses?