If you have a cloud web hosting account and you set up an email address, you may take the option to send and receive emails for granted, but in fact, this isn't always true. Sending e-mail messages isn't always a part of the website hosting packages that companies have and an SMTP service is needed to be capable to do that. The acronym stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the set of scripts that enables you to send emails. If you use an e-mail app, it creates a connection to the SMTP server. The latter then searches the DNS data of the domain, that is a part of the receiving address to find out which mail server deals with its email messages. After some system data is swapped, your SMTP server provides the message to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the email is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is needed if you are using some sort of contact form also, so in case you use a free of charge hosting package, for instance, it's probable that you will not be able to use this type of form since many free website hosting providers don't allow outgoing emails.