Why are rules sometimes ineffective?

[Swifty]

I have a rule in my Outlook 2003 that looks for certain characters in the
subject. These are letters such as an "A" with a grave or acute accent.

If such letters are present then I'm not going to be able to read the note,
so I might as well discard it. That is what my rule does, yet on occasions
these notes survive in my inbox.

I know it is not an error in the rule itself, as running the rule deletes
the note. It cannot be prior rules which "stopped futher rules processing"
because all such rules either move the mail out of the inbox or put it in a
category. Neither of these actions happened.

Is there something which can prevent rules from processing altogether?

Is there any way to maintain a history or which rules ran, and what they
did? I should imagine the product would be difficult to maintain without
some such tracing ability.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Does it only happen at certain times, like when you first start outlook?
Some versions begin to check for new mail before the rules engine loads.

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



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[Swifty]

Does it only happen at certain times, like when you first start outlook?

Some versions begin to check for new mail before the rules engine loads.

That is a plausible sugggestion. Yes, it is intermittent, and quite rare,
which has made it difficult for me to spot when it happens. I receive
about 300 junk mails a day, which are usually pre-filtered by Mailwasher,
but if I'm in a hurry to send an email I will bypass the mailwasher stage
and launch outlook first. It is at this point that the stage would be set
- outlook starting, and a backlog of spam.

The workaround is simple; leave outlook running, but then I would have to
transfer all my filters from Mailwasher to outlook to achieve the same
filtering success rates. Mailwasher alows the use of regular expressions
in its filters, which makes it possible to achieve a very high filtering
success rate with very few false positives.

Thank you for your help.