This is my situation. I set up a DNS server at home to host this website i have onto the internet.. everything works great! but, since i am on a LAN i cannot access my own website/mail from home on the same LAN that the server is on, becuase i cannot use the public IP address.

When i try to send mail using the Private email addresses as the SMTP and POP3 servers, i can send email out, but cannot recieve anything because i am not able to use the public IP address.

My question is.. is there any way i can set up my computer to act as if i were an outside user connecting to my server with the public IP address?

Did you open port 25 for SMTP?

yep got it wide open!

This means that basically your website is in your LAN. Correct? Where is your public DNS record for your website? On your own DNS or on some public register? If it is on the public register, you need to add a DNS record on your own DNS and point www to the LAN address of your server, same with MX record (first create mail host i.e. mail.domain.com point to your public IP address of your mail server, then point MX record to mail.domain.com)

Now the question is how do you route your traffic? Do you use router? If so, do you use Single User Account (SUA - port forwarding) or you use Network Address Translation (NAT - mapping between public and local IPs)? What router do you use? When working on your LAN, you don't need to use public IPs at all. You sould use your private IP addresses at all time. If you can't access your server using private IPs then ip nat loopback must be off, consult the maual of your router, for example if your're using Zyxel router, then you would open command interpreter mode and type in the following command

ip nat loopback on

this would allow you to see your Internet website on your LAN ..

You can always telnet into port 25 on your WAN and try to send an e-mail manually.

You can check this out here... http://www.yuki-onna.co.uk/email/smtp.html

If you are able to send an e-mail that way you atleast know it's not your server that's causing your problem, more likely the ISP and the host.