That should be fixed now.
The problem was that it doesn't immediately flag conflicted events as dealt with in case there is a later showing that could be scheduled.. Now I've changed it so that it marks an event as processed when it has finished going through all of the matching programmes - it means that it won't pick up on any repeats of the programme that appear in the EPG more than 7 days in the future, but it's better than getting an email every hour and seems like a good compromise.
btw, for your two related person searches, you could write a combined auto rule that would match either. They're likely to appear together so it would reduce the reported conflicts.
Something like:
"Bob Smith" "Fred Jones"
should work - there's an implied OR between two terms.