When you have a shared website hosting account and you create an email address, you might take the option to send out and receive emails for granted, but in fact, this isn't always true. Sending e-mail messages isn't always a part of the web hosting plans that service providers will offer you and an SMTP service is required to be able to do that. The abbreviation stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the set of scripts that permits you to send out e-mails. If you are using an email app, it creates a connection to the SMTP server. The latter then searches the DNS data of the domain name, which is a part of the receiving address to find out what mail server deals with its emails. After system information is swapped, your SMTP server provides the message to the remote IMAP or POP server and the email is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is needed if you are using some kind of contact page also, so if you use a free of charge hosting package, for example, it is very likely that you will not be able to make use of this type of form as many no charge website hosting providers don't allow outgoing e-mail messages.