Custom redirects from root not working

Not sure what I am doing wrong but I am unable to get custom redirects to work from the root. We have completely redone a website and want the popular old URL to redirect to new ones (fairly obvious). Problem is, it always goes to 404. My guess is that apache is hosting it up and it never gets to joomla.

For example, I want "/test" to redirect to "/mytest". Is that possible with SEF? Is that what this section is intended to do? Or do i need to manually update my htaccess for anything relative to root? One of my reasons for getting this was because of the redirect section. I would love to give admins the ability to setup their own redirects without me having to go and edit the htaccess...

Can I edit the htaccess to push everything through joomla so it gets caught by SEF Advance?

If you use the default .htaccess then it is already so. And yes, that's the purpose of the redirect secion. But make sure that what you redirect to exists!

If you can't get it to work send a mail with the access info and I will have a look.