When you have a website hosting account and you set up an e-mail address, you might consider the option to send out and receive messages for granted, but in fact, this is not always the case. Sending email messages isn't necessarily included in the web hosting plans that service providers feature and an SMTP service is needed to be able to do that. The abbreviation represents Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and that is the set of scripts that permits you to send out e-mails. If you use an email application, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then queries the DNS data of the domain, which is a part of the receiving address to find out which email server handles its email messages. After some system information is exchanged, your SMTP server provides the e-mail to the remote IMAP or POP server and the e-mail is finally delivered in the matching mailbox. An SMTP server is needed if you work with some sort of contact page as well, so in case you have a no charge hosting plan, for example, it's probable that you won't have the ability to use this type of form since many no charge website hosting providers don't allow outgoing emails.