mail / mailx question

[Paul Allen Newell]

I am running an F14 system which is pretty much out-of-the-box except I 
have the machine hardcoded to 192.168.2.13 to keep my network happy.

I see all sorts of uses of 'mail [...] root at localhost' which work great 
when I look in /var/spool/mail/root. I have read the mail / mailx 
documentation and tried sending mail to both root and my local account 
and it works great. The man pages keep using examples like 
"joe at somewhere.com", but when I try that with my email account 
(name at whatever.edu), it fails (as in nothing happens and I sometimes get 
resend errors). I can ping whatever.edu successfully.

I am certain this is a stupid pilot error, but can't figure it out.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Paul