found the answer :

oh sorry didn't see your message until after my page refreshed. let me look into that even though i'm not sure which storage folder you're referring to but i'll search the forums to see if i find that out.

k so the storage folder was set to all permissions, which removed the part of the error message but not the relay error. after looking at another post i see its probably a security setting on the server like the microsoft support link I posted above shows. so I have to either change the email address its relaying from or change the relay settings on the server. I'll mess with that for a while but I won't post anymore about this unless I run into bigger issues. Thanks for all the help and quick replies!