>Hi! 'm extremely new to Ruby.  come mainly from a Perl background, with 
>about a zillion other languages thrown in. )  bought "Programming Ruby" 
>(excellent book, so far) and am working my way through it.
>
>I am attempting to send an email via SMTP.  am doing the following code:
>
>require 'net/smtp'
>smtp = Net::SMTP.new
>smtp.start('130.102.202.23')
>
>But I get a "Connection refused - connect(2)".
>
>The SMTP port on our email server is 25 ( I have even tried specifying that) 
>and I have tried a bunch of different angles on this.  can connect using 
>Perl, Rebol, etc.
>
>Does anyone have an idea what I am doing wrong?

Here's my SMTP code (that works):

smtp = Net::SMTP.start('mail.server.whatever')
smtp.ready(from, to) do
  | a |
  message.each do
    | line |
    a.write(x + "\r\n")
    $stdout.write(x + "\r\n")  #debugging
  end
end

Kevin