my hosting firm is telling me that I cant send email out do to a cpanel update. does anyone else have this issue

None here.

Not to say that they couldn't have had a problem.

What do you mean by that, R U talking about having to do a receive mail first?

Perhaps you need to ask your host to update the cpanel build?

Cpanel had an issue yesterday with mail with the update to version 5. But it was fixed in version 5-23 I think we have gone now to version 5-38 in the last 12 hours so if your host updates the problem should be fixed.