I'm having difficulty creating an filtering rule. For this particular rule part of the subject is always that same, part of it will change; eg Subject: The same 'different' again the same. I can create a rule that will catch 'the same' or 'again the same', but that will catch other emails. What I want is to catch 'the same' and 'again the same'.
Is this possible?

I don't think that there's any way to match a string at a particular location in the Subject. That said, if you just want to filter emails that contain both (instead of either) of those strings, you can set up a pair of rules. One rule matches against one of the strings, and if it finds it, it sets a category. The second rule matches against both the string and the category, and does whatever it is that you want to do with the email. You might want a third rule to clear that category on half-matches.

Hmmm.....that is unfortunate. I've gone with just one rule and keying on part of the subject and the sender. I'll have to update this rule whenever the sender changes - which historically hasn't been too often.

Yeah, Outlook's filtering sucks ass. Thunderbird's is a little better, but still has a lot of room for improvement.

I ended up just converting all of my filters to imapfilter. It doesn't take effect immediately, unfortunately, but I can do just about anything with it.

Of course, that doesn't work if you don't have IMAP enabled in Exchange. DavMail Gateway should be able to help in that instance.

This is at work, at the big tilted E Corporation, so I'll have to live with the limitations of Outlook and like it