Thanks Trevor,
That seems to have cured the problem. Although I was wondering if you knew why the default behavior would be set to "boomerang" emails back to you. That seems like such an odd way to default and (as the thread you directed me to demonstrated) it doesn't seem to be how people (myself included) expect it to behave.
I never had this problem with my comcast emails.. is this a gmail exclusive behavior that the filter is the fix for ?
Thanks again for the link/solution, that seems to have done the trick !!