Thanks to you folks for you input.

There still something funky going on. If I put a stop in any rule, it seems
that none of the rules work, even if the rule with the stop is the last one
in the stack.

So, I deactivated all my rules except the the original one that moves the
mail to a folder if it's from someone in my contact list. If I run it
manually, it works every time. It won't run automated, whether there's a
stop in there or not. It simply won't run in automated mode.

Had a similar problem with another machine where I'm trying to send an 'auto
reply' to emails that were sent to a particular address. My rule first
moves the message to a folder, then responds with a fixed reply. The rule
works fine if I run it manually, but when the rule is left to run on it's
own, the message is moved but no auto reply is generated. It's the only
rule on the machine so I don't think it's a rule conflict.

Very frustrating!

"Diane Poremsky [MVP]" wrote in message
...
if there is a stop processing, its basically an ELSE as rules processing
stops if the message is acted on by rule 1.
if meets conditions of rule 1, do action 1, ELSE go to rule 2.
if meets conditions of rule 2, do action 2, ELSE go to rule 3.
if meets conditions of rule 3, do action 3, ELSE go to rule 4.

If you don't use stop processing it's basically AND:
if meets conditions of rule 1, do action 1 AND test it against rule 2.
if meets conditions of rule 2, do action 2 AND test it against rule 3.
if meets conditions of rule 3, do action 4 AND test it against rule 4.

you can use stop processing on some rules and not others - this will cause
messages that meet conditions in each rule to be processed by each rule.
If the action is move to a folder, you'll have a copy of each message in
each folder.
if meets conditions of rule 1, do action 1 AND test it against rule 2.
if meets conditions of rule 2, do action 2, ELSE go to rule 3. (Stop
processing)
if meets conditions of rule 3, do action 3 AND test it against rule 4.


--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
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"VanguardLH" wrote in message
...
Diane Poremsky [MVP] wrote:

Stop processing prevents you from applying any more rules to a message.
It's
not accurate to say you are ORing rules together because you aren't
(they
aren't AND'd together either) - each rule processes each message until a
matching rules tells it to stop checking more rules. if you have 3
rules
with conditions that match the message all three will do whatever action
each rule says to take. If the first has stop processing the rules
wizard
doesn't check the message against other rules and moves onto the next
message.

With the stop-clause:

if rule 1 fires do action 1
OR
if rule 2 fires do action 2
OR
if rule 3 fires do action 3
OR
...

The actions can be the same or different between each rule. Each rule
is a condition of the OR'ing. If you don't like the use of OR (which
provides for a short-circuit condition via the stop-clause) then use
SELECT, CASE, or SWITCH with the matching break-clause but most Outlook
users don't know those programming constructs.