Hi, J.
Welcome !
This may not be a very helpful answer (others may have better ones), but if you're getting so much spam that it actually
outweighs your "ham" (good) email, you might consider blacklisting every address
except those of your contacts (at least as a temporary measure).
Go to
Options > More Options > (Preventing Junk Mail) Filters and Reporting. You can change the junk mail filter setting from "standard" to "exclusive." As noted there, it will send ALL email to the junk folder except those from your contacts and from the Hotmail team. You just need to be sure all your recipients & contacts are, in fact, in your address book.
As an added measure (maybe it's overkill), you can also go to
(Preventing Junk Mail) Safe and Blocked Senders and put in (one by one) the people in your address book.
If this "exclusive" setting is not an option for you -- because of having too many contacts to work with or having too many good emails coming to you that aren't from contacts -- then I'm not sure what to suggest. As I say, others here may have ideas.
FWIW, I still find Hotmail to be the biggest "spam magnet" among my email accounts (which is why I don't use it for anything except testing). E.g.
two days after signing up for a new Hotmail account I had received more spam that I had for the lifetime of my other accounts combined ! And I hadn't even given out the email address to anyone !!
Oh... last minute thought: as an alternative you could always sign up for an account with another provider (say, Gmail) and have it POP the Hotmail account. Gmail's spam filters are surely better than Hotmail's and might give you some relief in that regard. In this case, you'd just let all email go to your Hotmail inbox and let Gmail's filters do the work.
You can even set Gmail up to send mail through Hotmail's servers. (And if you keep the Gmail address secret from everyone, have a good, long password, and set up two-factor authentication, you'd have a fairly secure and (hopefully) more spam-efficient set-up.)