When you've got a cloud website hosting package and you create an email address, you might consider the option to send and receive messages for granted, but in fact, this is not always true. Sending e-mail messages is not necessarily part of the website hosting packages that providers offer and an SMTP service is required to be able to do that. The abbreviation means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the set of scripts that allows you to send out e-mail messages. If you work with an e-mail program, it creates a connection to the SMTP server. The latter then requests 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 data is swapped, your SMTP server delivers the email to the remote IMAP or POP server and the email is finally delivered in the corresponding mailbox. An SMTP server is required if you use some sort of contact page as well, so in case you have a free hosting package, as an example, it is very likely that you will not have the ability to make use of this type of form as many free web hosting service providers don't allow outgoing emails.