I blocked the inbox for the gmail domain on my hotmail address. I am was getting every day dozens of spam emails with addresses that had randomized gmail account handles. I will see if I get any spam now. So, heads up, if you use a gmail account primarily, be aware others may have blocked the domain if they are getting tons of spam. I can’t imagine I was the only hotmail account holder getting this spam.
I have had my hotmail account since the Clinton presidency and I use it as my main email account. The spam started up bad on it the past 2 months.
It sounds more like a problem/limitation with Hotmail. Have you checked your spam filter settings? Scammers can spoof the from address of emails as easily as they can caller ID on your phone.
Exactly why I run my own domains for email. I use filters on the server in my hosting account and also in Thunderbird, which is my email client.
The domain name costs me under $15 a year and I can create many (or unlimited) email accounts and direct them as I see fit. So if I wanted, my email on the Clark forums can be different from another forum, and direct them all to one big intray. Then I can stop using any particular email account if it is massively spammed.
I could create clarkforum@ and anotherforum@ and thirdforum@. They could all be directed into zzz@. If anotherforum is spammed, I just unlink or delete that address and my main email is safe.
Gmail itself allows you to do that for free. lavarock@, l.avarock@, la.varock@ all go to the same intray but you will know which address is being spammed and can (if you want to eliminate it) just forward that email address to the SPAM filter.
Actually, Gmail itself has pretty good anti-spam filtering built in. I would transition to gmail and away from hotmail if it were me.
As of this morning, 10/16/2020, there are zero spam emails in my inbox. Typically I would have a dozen first thing in the morning.
This spamming happened all of a sudden the past summer. The spammers change their email to some random selection of letters, all with a gmail domain. The filter block will keep them from getting into the inbox. Unless hotmail has a way of knowing a legitimate gmail address from a robot generated email address, I will have to run this filter. Anybody who sends me email that I know who has a gmail handle, I will never get their email now unfortunately.
Thunderbird is a mail reader which is free and started by the same people who created Netscape browser.
The domains (like my business and personal ones) are in hosting accounts. As I say, the name itself is about $15 a year. The hosting accounts are usually also associated with websites but do not have to be.
If you only want an email account I would look to Gmail for the free offering. Your email account would be some name you choose @GMAIL.COM. During the transition you could forward your Hotmail messages to the Gmail account while you slowly change all those people to use the new address. You also, if you want, get a free telephone number with a Google account; although it is suggested that you not use that phone number for business as there is no live support, rather there are forums for help. They also have a number of free services similar to Microsoft Office which are online. Google as you probably know is a giant conglomerate of services.
I believe that Gmail already has SPAM filters for Gmail spoofing, because they can tell if an inbound message really came from one of their accounts.
You certainly can create a Gmail account and see if you like it and want to keep it. I personally have more than one and more than one phone number (shhhhh!). That is frowned upon.
The emails may be accessed through a web browser and/or through a program like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird or others.
You can forward calls to another phone or use an adapter or phone such as the Obihai devices to connect directly to Google. There also is an App for cellphones.