Hotmail safe/blocked senders lists

I use Hotmail through Thunderbird and have been getting questionable emails from a sender in my contacts. So I log onto Hotmail and try to place the sender in the blocked senders list and it tells me:

This entry could not be added because it is already in your safe senders list.

But yet - there is not a single entry in my safe senders list. The contact doesn't exist in my Hotmail contacts, just my Thunderbird contacts.

So does Hotmail have an active spam/blocked address option that works?

scratch that - I went to my inbox and back into my privacy settings and there are the
safe senders listed - odd, they weren't there when I checked it out when the message first popped up.

As much as I'm not a fan of Hotmail - I use it because it works with Thunderbird and fairly well. But this Windows Live is clunky, convoluted, and crowded. All I want and enjoy is Hotmail, wish we could streamline these options.