When you have a cloud hosting account and you create an email address, you might take the option to send out and receive emails for granted, but in fact, that isn't always the case. Sending e-mail messages is not necessarily part of the web hosting packages that service 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 software application that enables you to send email messages. If you work with an email app, it connects 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 what mail server manages its e-mails. After some system data is swapped, your SMTP server delivers the e-mail to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the e-mail is finally delivered in the matching mailbox. An SMTP server is necessary if you work with some sort of contact page form also, so if you use a free hosting plan, for instance, it's probable that you won't be able to use this type of form as most free of charge web hosting companies don't allow outgoing e-mail messages.
