bump
so I figured out how to do this. i don't know why it wasn't working in the first place. my problem was that any email being send from a2b was not passing the from email field. the reason this was, is because the $fromemail field fro, the database was not being passed through to the mail message that was being sent out. (i had to make this change to signup_confirmed.php, forgotpassword.php) To rectify this, I changed the $fromname field to $fromemail. This allows the customer to recieve an email that comes from the addy sent from fromemail rather than localhost.
p.s hope this helps someone!