For this forum, you could always have asked me to change it for you (as others have done). We’re happy to help.
That’s surprising. Is that a recent issue? I’ve not tested in a while, but last time I did the emails were reliably coming through within a few minutes.
Where you say “spambots”, do you mean email service provider’s “anti-spam” software? If so, providers such as “hotmail” have been aware of the problem for very many years, and appear to have done nothing at all to fix it. I guess that they thing it’s the end user’s job to whitelist the address of forums that they use.