Check languages and this works fine.

S.F.

So I've learned some more about my situation..

* seems like my hosting provider had a little known secret of requireing login's for SMTP service, even though it allowed my test messages through, I don't think it would have worked for newsletter

* secondly.. it appears that either an address in the "To" section of the message .. or in the "from" section has to be from my register hosting/domain e-mail.

BUT upon getting past that I got the following exception now:

AssemblyVersion: 04.08.00
PortalID: 1
PortalName: Seattle Rough Trade
UserID: 3
UserName: <removed>
ActiveTabID: 62
ActiveTabName: Newsletters
RawURL: /Admin/BulkEmail/tabid/62/Default.aspx
AbsoluteURL: /Default.aspx
AbsoluteURLReferrer: http://seattle.rtgc.org/Admin/BulkEmail/tabid/62/Default.aspx
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
DefaultDataProvider: DotNetNuke.Data.SqlDataProvider, DotNetNuke.SqlDataProvider
ExceptionGUID: 5b886c94-0680-40fa-88dd-7e5d7682862d
InnerException: Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: Authentication is required for relay
FileName:
FileLineNumber: 0
FileColumnNumber: 0
Method: System.Net.Mail.SmtpTransport.SendMail
StackTrace:
Message: System.Net.Mail.SmtpFailedRecipientException: Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: Authentication is required for relay at System.Net.Mail.SmtpTransport.SendMail(MailAddress sender, MailAddressCollection recipients, String deliveryNotify, SmtpFailedRecipientException& exception) at System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.Send(MailMessage message) at DotNetNuke.Services.Mail.Mail.SendMail(String MailFrom, String MailTo, String Cc, String Bcc, String ReplyTo, MailPriority Priority, String Subject, Mailformat Bodyformat, Encoding BodyEncoding, String Body, String[] Attachment, String SMTPServer, String SMTPAuthentication, String SMTPUsername, String SMTPPassword, Boolean SMTPEnableSSL)
Source:
Server Name: MICRO108

Sebastian Leupold wrote make sure, the login credentials for the SMTP server are specified correctly in the SMTP server section of  your host settings.

I did that.. and got the test e-mail..

I even got the newletter report this time saying that no message were sent, which is more than I've gotten in the past :).

I stumbled across a posting once mentioning something about IIS needing to have some kind of SMTP relay set up or something.. I've asked my hosting provider to look into it.  Just keeping people abreast with little progress I've made at this point.  Might help others who's servers are so particular.