If you have a website hosting account and you create an e-mail address, you may consider the option to send and receive emails for granted, however, that isn't always the case. Sending emails is not always included in the web hosting packages that providers feature and an SMTP service is necessary to be capable to do that. The acronym stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the set of scripts that allows you to send out emails. If you work with an email application, 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 email server handles its emails. After system information is swapped, your SMTP server provides the e-mail to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the email is finally delivered in the corresponding mailbox. An SMTP server is necessary if you are using some kind of contact page form too, so in case you work with a cost-free hosting package, for instance, it is likely that you won't be able to make use of such a form as many cost-free web hosting service providers don't allow outgoing emails.
