When you've got a website hosting plan and you create an email address, you may take the option to send and receive emails for granted, however, this isn't always true. Sending email messages isn't always included in the web hosting packages that service providers have and an SMTP service is necessary to be capable to do that. The acronym signifies Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and that is the set of scripts that enables you to send email messages. If you are using an email app, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then requests the DNS records of the domain name, that is a part of the receiving address to find out which email server deals with its emails. After some system information is exchanged, your SMTP server provides the message to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the e-mail is finally delivered in the matching mailbox. An SMTP server is necessary if you work with some kind of contact page form as well, so in case you use a no charge hosting package, as an example, it is very likely that you won't have the ability to use such a form as most no charge hosting providers do not allow outgoing emails.