When you have a cloud website hosting package and you set up an email address, you may take the option to send and receive emails for granted, however, that isn't always true. Sending e-mail messages is not necessarily part of the web hosting packages that providers have and an SMTP service is required to be able to do that. The acronym represents Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and that is the set of scripts that enables you to send emails. If you are using an e-mail program, 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 mail server manages its emails. After some system data is exchanged, 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 kind of contact page as well, so in case you use a no charge hosting package, as an example, it's probable that you won't have the ability to make use of this type of form as many no charge website hosting service providers don't allow outgoing email messages.