situation:

in a php script i wrote the mail function mails an email to a specified email. but the university system won't let the script send to anyone but people on the network. i.e. if i sent an email to my friend living down the hall through this script it'd work fine, but to a yahoo.com address it gets bounced back to the sysadmin.

so i wanted to have the emails first sent to an account on the server, and then forwarded to the specified user.

any thoughts of how i could go about doing this?

My guess is that you are using sendmail to send it and the sysadmins have only let you send to lcoal accounts. Try connecting directly to the university smtp server.

i have no idea how to do that.

I think you just need to edit your sendmail config to use the university smtp server as it's relay and make the user that apache runs as a trusted mail user (lets it send mail with a name other than it's own).

i don't think the university allows relays, which is the problem. but i'll play with that idea, thanks

I think what you are saying is that you need to have that email leave your server as a local account (i.e. sk8guitar@university.edu), and they are probably leaving with something like apache@your.box.com and getting bounced.

Is that right?
If so, you'd be better off to give the email a different "from" address that the server is allowed to relay. You just need to add it to the header info in your php email script.

Maybe something like:
$announce_to_email = "joe@yahoo.com";
$announce_from_email = "sk8guitar@university.edu";
$announce_from_name = "Your Name";

$mail_header = "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n");
$mail_header .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1\r\n";
$mail_header .= "To: Someone <$announce_to_email>\n";
$mail_header .= "From: $announce_from_name <$announce_from_email>\n");

I think your university server just isn't relaying it, but if you can post more info about what's going on (error messages etc), I could be more help.

good luck!