Receiving high numbers of spam in my inbox...what product do you recommend for anti-virus protection?

Do not install any third party antivirus apps. They are not needed and they may cause problems. Your Mac has built-in protection.

macOS - Security - Apple

Security features on your MacBook Pro - Apple Support

Effective defenses against malware and ot… - Apple Community

That can indicate that someone has gained access to your email password. Try a new password for your email account and see if that makes a difference.

What mail client are you using?

If usng Apple's Mail app, you can set up rules to help with unwanted mail:

Use rules to manage emails you receive in Mail on Mac - Apple Support

One under-appreciated step you can take is to stop automatically "acknowledging" receipt of corporate/spam emails.

Load Remote content in messages:

When remote content is retrieved from a [remote] server, information about your Mac can be revealed. You can deselect the option for increased security, but some messages may not display correctly.

Remote content isn’t displayed in messages that Mail marks as junk.

to view the remote content in legitimate messages, just click the (show remote content) button in that message.

Mail > Preferences > Viewing ...

[_] Load remote content in messages

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Another tip you may already know: Never, ever, click/tap on any unsubscribe link in spam. All that does is confirm a live address, which the spammer then uses not only to send you more spam, but also adds it to a list of verified addresses spammers sell to each other.

That's an interesting and slightly different feature than previous MacOS Mail offered.

Using that version, you don't have to endure the wonky-looking good corporate emails missing the remote content.

Spam is just spam. Unwanted emails that no AV software can do even the slightest thing about. It's also just generally useless.

In Monterey 12.3, that Preference setting has moved to the Mail Preferences > Privacy panel with a different name:

Users can select the ? symbol to get more descriptive information.