When you've got a cloud hosting plan and you set up an email address, you might take the option to send and receive emails for granted, but in fact, this is not always the case. Sending emails is not always part of the website hosting packages that companies will offer you 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 enables you to send out e-mail messages. If you are using an email app, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then looks up the DNS data of the domain, which is a part of the receiving address to find out what email server handles its e-mails. After system data is exchanged, your SMTP server delivers the message to the remote IMAP or POP server and the email is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is needed if you are using some kind of contact page as well, so if you have a free of charge hosting package, for example, it is likely that you will not be able to make use of this type of form since many free of charge web hosting companies do not allow outgoing email messages.