If you have a cloud hosting account and you set up an e-mail address, you might consider the option to send and receive emails for granted, however, that isn't always true. Sending emails is not necessarily part of the website hosting plans that companies feature and an SMTP service is necessary to be able to do that. The acronym means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and that is the set of scripts that enables you to send out email messages. If you work with an e-mail application, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then searches the DNS data of the domain name, that is a part of the receiving address to find out what mail server handles its email messages. After some system data is exchanged, your SMTP server delivers the e-mail to the remote IMAP or POP server and the email is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is required if you are using some kind of contact page form also, so in case you use a free hosting package, for instance, it is likely that you won't be able to use this type of form since many free of charge hosting service providers don't allow outgoing e-mail messages.