ok the problem was resolved, I wanted to post the resolution here so someone could search on it in the future and hopefully get a similiar problem resolved.
There was an unprintablecharacter in the email address that was trying to be filtered. We I copied the email address from a certain spot in the UI to the exclusion, as opposed to typing it in,and it worked. This was tried in the past, but for some reason it worked this time... So for anyone searching this, try multiple times to re-create the email address being excluded in the filter.