No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it (Django)

Question

I have followed the Django Book up until chapter seven, and I am currently messing around with forms, GET, POST and all that goodness. At one point, the guide made me figure out

Answer 1

I managed to find out what the problem was (no thanks to the error message). As it turns out, I needed to set up my e-mail server:

Note that in order to send e-mail using send_mail(), your server must be configured to send mail, and Django must be told about your outbound e-mail server. See http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/email/ for the specifics.

I guess I thought little of what was meant by it, but I was pointed in the direction of this guide, and things eventually started to click.

Thanks to everyone for chiming in with their advice. That is one useless error message, and I can only assume the people who helped me out only knew the answer because they had experienced the exact same thing.