Emailing from ARAS fails

I have exhausted every possibility.  ARAS never produces any email output other than writing a file to the Temp folder.  If I make the ARAS Temp folder the same as the IIS SMTP Pickup folder an email will go, otherwise I never see any activity of any kind from ARAS.  I have put an SMTP server up that I can watch the activity on and it shows activity from any other send effort except the standard ARAS Item.email methods. I have written code that uses .NET SMTP in an ARAS Method and that always works.  I can make it put a file in a folder if I set IIS up to do that.  I can drop files into the IIS Pickup folder and see them go.  I can send to IIS from any other application except ARAS via the internal Email methods. At this point we are dead in the water and are looking at having to write custom Email handlers for every single thing we need notifications from.  I am deeply disappointed in how little information I can obtain and how difficult it has been to diagnose this given the opacity I am experiencing.  I cannot get any error information out of ARAS, I have no visibility into what is going on, it is a black box that consumes emails and never outputs anything to any form of server. Please, can someone shed light on what is going on here?  I am at 4 days of doing what amounts to the same things in a vain hope I find something I missed, but everything keeps pointing back to something in ARAS that I cannot see so cannot fix.