Ok, a bit of background first.
My boss at work asked to make a system to put bookings onto for various things (meetings, car parking spaces, contractors, company vehicles etc). I made it using PHP and mySQL and hosted it on www.freehostia.com, which seems to be quite a fully featured web host considering it's free. Everything was all working fine and the system took off quite well.
I was later asked to add a maintenance request form and integrate it, which didn't take much work because of the already exisiting framework for it. Now, he's asked me if it's possible to send him an email when a job is requested. Sure enough, I set about it... now this is where things get complicated.
I can't use PHP's mail() as we don't have an SMTP server to use (They're pushing to make it all completley free btw) and the hosting doesn't provide one.
I can't seem to use an external site's SMTP (such as smtp.gmail.com) as I can't edit my php.ini file on the web host.
I can't use the college system to send it as we are using an exchange server and have quite a strict policy on what we can do (I can't even connect an FTP client to a server from inside the college as I don't have permission, even though I actually have)
I've tried using an example demonstrating fsockopen to send the email, but it fails everytime with error 13 (permission denied), despite php.info reporting allow_open_urls to be true.
I need an idea how to just send an email, for free, from PHP, where I can spoof the headers to appear to be sent from within our domain and to set the reply-to address.
Any ideas?