check your settings, I have had a hotmail account for years and it does not do what you are saying, I currently have 20plus pages of read emails. I know it is time to clean it out but just have not had time. I have never seen one that deleted mail that way, has to be something in the settings. do you not like thunderbird? you can still use it. You could use another web client and let it collect your hotmail email for you and keep it there one I use is inbox.com and gmx.com. I like gmx.com quite a bit. I have it set up to get my email from other accounts and keep it there so I can view it all at one spot. To do that all you need to do is give it the username and password to the email account you want it to connect to and collect the email from.

Me and computers have our problems and I just now realized I lost the same line. I finally found the problem. If you click on the symbol for "full page screen" at top right you will probably have the line back. It is between the - and the X. Good luck!

I use Windows Live Mail that gets my server mail. There are 2 ways to block it in there. I maybe get one spam a year, it usually something I have done to receive it. It is not because I blocked it. A tech from my server told me to make a unique email address and it will stop most spam. He said he didn't get any spam. A lot of people say this doesn't work but it does for me. I make an addy that only makes sense to me using an old street address number mixed in with my initials alternating numbers and letters.

Maybe you might want to spend some extra efforts to get rid of the live.com outlook.com hotmail.com Cookies on that laptop. Maybe one is corrupted and stuck. Ccleaner newest version would be a good start and look in the cookie options.