Can,t send mail in t-bird or evolution.????

[potat0]

This is an issue for my fedora box only. I get the error that "the
message could not be sent b/c connecting to smpt server failed. The
server may be unavailable or is refusing smpt connections. Please
verify that your smpt setting is correct and try again, or else
contact your admin. All setting are the  same as xp and my suse
partitions?? Does the permissions for t-bird have to be set to read
and write for users to send mail??? Any help is greatly appreciated.
I have posted this in three other sites forums w/o a single reply.