more on smtpmail / gmail failure:

[raman]

I also have openssl installed on the Jaunty box. I'll probably
upgrade this machine in the next few weeks, since it's now
impossible to install any packages on Jaunty -- but it would
still be nice if smtpmail worked like the tls.el library, which
uses either gnutls-cli or openssl depending on what is
available. At the time, I  had intentionally removed gnutls-bin
package because gnuuutls-cli was breaking emacs/W3, --- that is a
problem that very few emacs users would care about --- but
unfortunately I happen to be one of those who  still depends on
Emacs/W3 

--Raman 

-- 
Best Regards,
--raman