The present invention relates to a system and methodology to facilitate timely delivery of notifications and performance of automated actions for users in the framework of an ad-hoc rules processing environment. An information agent operates as a distributed application to perform automated actions for users in accordance with user preferences and context. Various rules can be executed to delay, inhibit, and/or enable an action such as sending notifications according to the preferences and current user states as determined from the context. The rules can include data centric matching logic, set-oriented execution rules, rule ordering/interaction hierarchies, and ad-hoc Boolean combinations, for example.