i have set up roots email to be forwarded to my username on my FC4 box using the /etc/aliases file. although I'm not even sure if that works. Should that be working as soon as mail enters root's box, or is it a job that sends it every so many minutes?
anyway, my real question is i want to send email that is in my linux inbox to a hotmail account. How can i achieve this?

Thanks for any help!
-Dave

/etc/aliases is nothing more than just a file (database) with e-mail aliases. In order for these mail aliases
to be actually used, you of course need a mail server program.
Check if "sendmail", "postfix" or anything alike is installed and running on your system.

Typically, you can do this by running:
/sbin/chkconfig --list
and checking for the programs above (they should have got an "on" for levels 3-4-5 at least.
"/sbin/service <service_name> status" may also work (for valid service names, do "ls /etc/init.d"

To try your Linux to hotmail alias, you could also just set it up in /etc/aliases and try it out.
/var/log/maillog or something like that may give you a clue on what's going on/what's going wrong.

sendmail is up and running. I know it works because I can send email from the command line. If i put an entry in the /etc/aliases file like:

user: me@hotmail.com

that should work? do i need to make the database or anything? thanks.

-Dave

Yes, you should update your aliases database after having made the changes to the "aliases" (plain text) file.
Use the "newaliases" command for that. It'll recreate/update a binary file called "aliases.db".
See also "man aliases".