sendmail, what else

I've just rebuilt my linux box and upgraded from red hat linux 8 to linux 9. I had setup issues with apache and sendmail, but recompiling and reinstalling seemed to fix them for apache. I removed sendmail with rpm -e, and then reinstalled the linux 9 sendmail rpm, which seemed to get sendmail working again. After erasing the old rpm, it saved the old config files, which after re-installing i copied over the new/default config files. I used m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf to be sure the config file was written properly and restarted sendmail with no complaints. Everything seemed to be going fine. The only problem is that sendmail isn't sending mail, its not even writing to /var/spool/mqueue as far as i can tell, which is the QueueDirectory. Oddly enough, it does send to itself and catch its incoming mail, which is quite the opposite of the problem I had when setting it up. I've read countless sendmail tutorials and message boards including this one and havent found a solution to the problem. Any ideas?