Outlook rules moving wrong emails (but works properly when rules are manually applied)

Question

I get a lot of automated system alerts each day. I wanted to declutter my inbox, so I setup a number of rules to automatically move these to a "notifications" folder. The rules are generally specified of type: subject line contains....

The trouble is that I am getting a lot of messages incorrectly routed to this "Notifications" folder. I am not sure why, or which rule is driving this. Following a suggestion in this thread, I have tried moving the messages back to Inbox and manually rerunning the rules through Rules and Alerts >> Run Rules Now. But when I do this manually, the messages don't move! They stay in the Inbox, just as I intended in the first place!

Can anyone shed light on what might be going on, or what further steps I can take for debugging?

Answer 1

The issue was that some of my rules were based on the sender. I thought that specifying FROM <an alias> would filter only the rules that literally came from that alias. In fact, the rule moves any email from anyone who is a member of the alias. This link has some further info, now that I knew what to look for.

(Mind you, I am still not sure why a manual trigger of the same rules did not cause them to move the second time around.)