Previously the MPM/Prefilter engines would suggest the same rule
candidates multiple times.
For example, while processing the request body, the http headers
would be inspected by MPM multiple times.
The mask check was one way to quickly decide which rules could be
skipped.
Now that the MPM engines normally return a rule just once, this
mask check no longer makes sense. If the rule meets the ip/port/
direction based conditions, it needs to be evaluated if the MPM
said so. Even if not all conditions are yet true.