Apple Mail - Changes of Smart Mailboxes don't stick

I have been dealing with problems with Smart Mailboxes for Apple Mail for months now. I have been talking to Apple Support personnel six to seven times, and they can not resolve the issue.

We have tried a lot of things, and they say they know about the problem, bit cannot fix it at them moment.
So here is my situation:

I have several smart mailboxes that I somehow was able to set up. No change in any form that I make to these smart mailboxes stick, I can not add people or rules, I can not delte people, i am stuck with what I some time ago was able to come up with as a smwart mailbox.

However, what worked was logging out of icloud, making changes to the smart mailbox, and then log in again, then the changes were saved. But thats of course not a workable soluztion

Any experience with this problem - and even better proposals for a solution?