exactly my point pfaut. I've actually tried several things. I've done the mail:sendmail thing with perl. I've tried mail function in PHP. (so yea, going through sendmail both times) and neither worked. I'm thinking my problem may lie in it's trying to mail from localhost.nycap.rr.com. My domain is finn.ws however, since we reside on the roadrunner network, I'm thinking something is resolving our dns to the roadrunner one instead of the finn.ws one. . . Sendmail hasn't had problems until now and mailing from imap and pop3 still works fine inside and outside the network.

See, to me, I'm thinking the connection refused is comming up because there is no localhost.nycap.rr.com and it should be connecting to localhost or finn.ws. to mail.