In case you have a website hosting account and you set up an email address, you might consider the option to send and receive messages for granted, however, this is not always true. Sending e-mail messages is not always a part of the web hosting packages that providers feature and an SMTP service is necessary to be able to do that. The acronym means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the piece of software that permits you to send out e-mails. If you use an email app, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then queries the DNS records of the domain name, which is a part of the receiving address to find out which mail server manages its emails. After some system data is interchanged, your SMTP server provides the email to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the email is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is required if you use some sort of contact form as well, so in case you use a free hosting plan, as an example, it is very likely that you won't have the ability to make use of such a form as most no charge hosting service providers don't allow outgoing emails.