outlook 2007 XP rules not working

[susanb]

The system is XP Professional
I am using Office and Outlook 2007.
I have many rules that shift emails from my inbox to various folders.
Mostly they used to work.
Now mostly they don't - i.e. the emails sit in my inbox.
I could delete all my rules and start again, but that is a large amount of
work.
Is there a way of getting them to work again?

Also, is there some way of sorting the rules by title; moving them up and
down is not at all time-efficient. Being able to sort them by title would
enable me to see at a glance which related to which folder.

 

[VanguardLH]

The system is XP Professional I am using Office and Outlook 2007. I
have many rules that shift emails from my inbox to various folders.
Mostly they used to work. Now mostly they don't - i.e. the emails sit
in my inbox. I could delete all my rules and start again, but that is
a large amount of work. Is there a way of getting them to work again?

Without knowing exactly what all the rules do and their order, no one
can tell you how they should work. Only guesses can be offered.

Disable all your rules and enable just the one that you want to test.
If it works alone but not when the other rules are enabled then it
could be a prior rule is firing and has a stop-clause that prevents
getting to the other rule, or that a prior rule makes a change that
masks the test criteria in a later rule.

Also, is there some way of sorting the rules by title; moving them up
and down is not at all time-efficient. Being able to sort them by
title would enable me to see at a glance which related to which
folder.

That doesn't make sense. A "title" does not define the criteria or
actions performed by a rule. The rules are executed in the order that
you list them. In fact, there may be rules that are NOT to be
exercised if a prior rule fires (and why you need to use the "stop
processing more rules" clause). Exercising multiple rules against the
same message can have unplanned side effects. Not using the
stop-clause means you deliberately want to OR together multiple rules.