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.

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.

Citrus don't like to share, pots that is. Seriously though, don't do it. They don't like it, plus citrus aren't drought tolerant, so that'd be a bad match anyway.

That is called backscatter. See here > Backscatter or Bounced emails dadoes, Elmer J Fudd and zep516 and lazy_gardens are correct. How this happens is that someone who has your email address in their contacts list was attacked and their contacts list was harvested for the sole purpose of abusing to send out spam emails to the masses. Many of the emails the spams were sent to are dead email addresses that do not exist any more. Do use a known clean computer to change your email account password, though that will not prevent those spoofed emails from being redirected back to you. You may need to contact your email client support dept to see if their mail server admin has a way to enable some sort of bounce verification. I doubt they do since most don't. A few months ago this happened to me. I was in the process of deleting pages of these spoofed, bounced emails when my account was suddenly disabled by my ISP. Seems the backscatter "broke" their server. lol! The solution was to contact the admin of my ISP's mail server and tweak the settings in my account to prevent this from happening and to get full access/control back to my account. The funny part is that the email server admin had never heard of backscatter and insisted that I allowed remote access to my computer so he could run malware scans, which is totally against my beliefs to allow any stranger access my computer remotely. To prove my point, I went ahead and allowed him access so he could run his scan, which of course all scans came out clean. After swallowing his pride and me sharing the link to Pieter Arntz's (Metallica) blog above he learned something new that will hopefully help other ISP client that may find themselves bombarded with backscatter. Good luck!