Hi @dustbro
The linuxbabe tutorial is not the official one. The official one which it’s based on is the Install from Source Code option found here and it mentions mod_rewrite in step 1.
You have stated the email is sent successfully when using the test script, but are you succesfully receiving the email as well?
Reason 6 on this Email Troubleshooting page speaks about file permissions. Did you double check those?
If you are trying to send the email from your mail host, and attempting to log into the host server, port 26 is a very unusual port to use. It would normally be port 587 for SMTP.