well looks like my /etc/hosts is different then the box that is working, i didnt clarify myself earlier, bascially mail messages are not being sent to /var/log/syslog... its a zero length file. On the box that is not working loghost is not on the same line as the hostname of the machine. Which I think i did, because i beleive this leaves you open to a denial of service attack. I thought this allowed you to be a syslog server, and thus other machines could send you syslog messages... so in order to resolve this could i take out the loghost reference in /etc/syslog.conf?
mail.debug ifdef(`LOGHOST', /var/log/syslog, @loghost)