Well, the problem was in the firewall, but it doesn't explain EVERYTHING that happened.
After two hours on the phone Mon afternoon with Qwest tech support level 2, they insisted I try ping/traceroute with the firewall disabled. Pings moved through as expected ...hmmmm
Heh. Wierd. Glad to see you got it up and running though. On the e-mail question, I've no clue unless they're all using the same hostnames; in which case, it's probably due to something along the lines of relaying being denied. As to the question of why you had connectivity for that two hours, it IS really wierd, but it's possible that the firewall wasn't running at home when you made the changes, or that for some odd reason it hadn't included the rc.firewall.blocked script upon restart... (Okay, stabbing in the dark there.) George