system emails not sent on account creation

I had set up two rules, each to run triggered on 'new account creation'.

when testing the user experience for new account registration, I noticed the Administrator nor the 'test user', was receiving any email verification from the Drupal system, despite the 'user settings' being set to 'visitors require Admin approval' and 'email verification required'.

It took me half a day to track it down to the Rules module. After I deleted the two rules (one to display a message and one to re-direct to a particular node), setting up another dummy account produced the expected results, ie confirmation and approval emails being sent to respective Admin and dummy user email addresses.