I'm still curious as to how they made it appear as if I had sent myself spam mail (ie: my hotmail address was in the "from" column).

Forging the return address is so simple that my Cat could do it. The return address is just a field in the mail message header, and that field is under the control of the server that sent the message. Since spammers usually use their own mail servers to distribute the messages, there's little to stop them from doing it.

Almost all spam has forged return addresses, but it's not common for them to forge the address by entering your name (although it's not unheard of).

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Tony Fabris