Email help

I have my email hooked up to my hotmail account.  I have about 24 or so messages that I keep in there at all times.  Sometimes I will get a notification that I have new unread emails.  When i go to my inbox, my oldest 5 or so messages will be marked as unread.  I have to mark them as read at least once a day and it is very annoying.

Why is this happening and how do I fix it?

I checked my hotmail settings and can't find anything unusual.

It looks like I will get five new messages (legitimate new messages), so my phone takes away the five oldest messages.  When I delete the new messages, the oldest five come back as unread.

I had a similar problem with my iPhone except it was brinigng back messages from two years ago so I believe it is a hotmail problem, but can't figure out why.

I've been having problems with hotmail for several months now after they did some sort of an update.