A (for me) break-thru discovery about OE rules (and getting them to work again)

I have had problems off and on with the rules working/not working in OE. I searched previous threads here (this is my first post here - nice forums!). My problem wasn't the usual thing of not understanding how the rules work, i.e., 'and' vs 'or', importance of the order of the rules, etc - I've become pretty sharp on setting up the rules.

Bottom line, what I started suspecting and recently confirmed was that having proxy servers (like certain AV programs and bayesian SPAM filters) in the mail processing string disrupted the operation of the rules.

We use the licensed network version of AVG, which sets itself up as a proxy within OE (I think I said that right - I'm not that far up on the learning curve on this stuff), and I had recently been experimenting with a "universal" Bayesian SPAM filter, when all of a sudden, my OE rules quit working. I found that a handful of rules without bayesian filtering work **much** better for me than fully-trained bayesian filtering without OE rules (all of our company's "catchall" mail comes into my computer - so I get **lots** of SPAM - most with bogus addresses with the correct domain name - making it very easy to build a couple of 100% robust and very effective rules for).

I discovered when I went to load the latest AVG Network version on a new computer for another employee that the newest version of AVG does not default to a mail proxy server (possibly because of problems like I had been experiencing). I took the opportunity to test my theory that the proxy scenario was the problem and set my AVG up the same way, and at the same time disabled the bayesian filter, and voíla - my rules started magically working again ('deleting from server' 98+% of the junk right off the bat) - and my time spent dealing with the SPAM went way down. It would be nice to have both the bayesian filtering **and** the OE rules working simultaneously to squeeze those last few nuisance spams out, but I'm happy with just the rules after having to work without rules for a couple of weeks.

Hopefully this info. will help someone else who is struggling with OE rules and may have proxies set up in OE but doesn't realize that that is possibly the reason for the non-functioning rules.