When you've got a cloud web hosting plan and you create an email address, you might take the option to send and receive messages for granted, however, that isn't always the case. Sending e-mail messages is not always included in the web hosting plans that service providers feature and an SMTP service is necessary to be able to do that. The abbreviation stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the set of scripts that enables you to send out email messages. If you use an email application, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then looks up the DNS records of the domain, that is a part of the receiving address to find out which email server handles its emails. After some system data is interchanged, your SMTP server delivers the email to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the e-mail is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is necessary if you work with some sort of contact form too, so in case you have a free of charge hosting package, as an example, it is likely that you won't have the ability to use such a form as many cost-free website hosting providers do not allow outgoing emails.