When you've got a website hosting account and you set up an email address, you may consider the option to send out and receive messages for granted, but in fact, this isn't always true. Sending emails is not always a part of the hosting plans that service providers feature and an SMTP service is needed to be able to do that. The acronym means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the set of scripts that enables you to send out e-mail messages. If you use an e-mail program, it creates a connection to the SMTP server. The latter then queries the DNS records of the domain, which is a part of the receiving address to find out which mail server deals with its email messages. After some system information is interchanged, your SMTP server delivers the message to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the email is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is needed if you are using some kind of contact page too, so if you use a cost-free hosting plan, as an example, it's probable that you won't have the ability to make use of such a form since many free of charge hosting companies don't allow outgoing emails.