My advice would be to take this as an incentive to downgrade the hotmail account to junkmail, and switch to a better webmail provider for your important mail. For a paid account, I'd recommend posteo.net. It's cheap, reliable, and has great customer service. For free email accounts there are mailfence.com, mail2world.com, gmx.com, & aol.com. Been with all of these for many years without problems. I ditched live.com, yahoo, and gmail because of problems like those you are now aware of, some years ago.