thanks to everyone that responded to this question. i now have things
working . i believe now my dns was not setup quite right. i had the
name of my server being that of my domainname, that is the hostname
was the domainname. when i changed this and gave it a different hostname
mail relay started working. i'm not positive this is what was wrong, but it
is working now. btw - i did run newaliases for those of you that asked, but
the system will rebuild it automatically if you dont, fyi.

thanks again,

daryl