HELP! Sendmail/smail not working

[Dale Morris <dlm@well.com>]

I seem to have screwed up my mail transfer abilities. I had sendmail
installed, also ssh and whatever kde2 program that was similar. I
installed the xterm package from 'woody' and noticed that sendmail was
being replaced. When I try to send a mail in mutt, I can't, get
'operating system error' message. So I apt-get install smail and it says
it can't find the package but I can use ssmtp instead. When I try to
send a mail with it I get 'error unable to open port smtp port 25'
message. I tried removing ssh but that didn't make any difference, also
installing exim, but that didn't work either. Any suggestions?

Debian 2.2 system with potato and woody packages.

thanks