Command line mutt not working

Hi,
We are using SuSE linux 9.0 and want to use command line mutt like the following:
echo " blah blah " |mutt -s "blah blah" a.n.other@xyz.com

Now this is working perfectly fine on some of our servers, but when I recently tried it on a new one(in another network) it is not working.

I have put the appropriate entry in the relayhost entry in the main.cf:
relayhost = [smtp.hstname.edu]

I tested the smtp server above with telnet, and everything seems to be in order there as well. However when I run the mutt command, I get the following messages in /var/log/mail

Aug  9 06:40:03  postfix/smtp[1406]: smtp_parse_destination: [smtp.hstnme.edu] smtp
Aug  9 06:40:03 somlzr postfix/smtp[1406]: fatal: unknown service: smtp/tcp
Aug  9 06:40:04 somlzr postfix/qmgr[1116]: warning: premature end-of-input on private/smtp socket while reading input attribute name
Aug  9 06:40:04 somlzr postfix/qmgr[1116]: warning: private/smtp socket: malformed response
Aug  9 06:40:04 somlzr postfix/qmgr[1116]: warning: transport smtp failure -- see a previous warning/fatal/panic logfile record for the problem description
Aug  9 06:40:04 somlzr postfix/master[1109]: warning: process /usr/lib/postfix/smtp pid 1406 exit status 1
Aug  9 06:40:04 somlzr postfix/master[1109]: warning: /usr/lib/postfix/smtp: bad command startup -- throttling

Could you let me know what needs to be done or verified in order for this to work.

many thanks,
Sandeep