restrictions

I find that my the company that I work for is a little over protective. My machine is quite restricted (as in firewall and accessability) when it comes to ftp and telnet. Well basically my hands are tied in that sense. I am testing my database build on my local machine which runs fine and all. I am curious though as to how these restrictions may affect my attempts to send "mail()" I have tried various external SMTP srervers (i am running off winxp pro) in my php.ini file and I get nothing. Just the error code I have placed in (below). <?php if (mail("somebody@somewhere.com", "this title", "testing")) echo "Mail Sent!"; else echo "Mail could not be sent..."; ?> Warning: Failed to connect to mailserver, verify your "SMTP" setting in php.ini in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\_tasks\email.php on line 21 Mail could not be sent... Would my local machines restrictions be stopping the mail function from communicating with the SMTP server?? Cheers