When you've got a cloud website hosting plan and you create an e-mail address, you may take the option to send out and receive emails for granted, however, this is not always the case. Sending emails is not necessarily a part of the website hosting plans that providers have and an SMTP service is required to be able to do that. The abbreviation signifies Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the piece of software that permits you to send e-mails. If you are using an e-mail program, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then queries the DNS data of the domain, that is a part of the receiving address to find out which email server manages its emails. After some system information is swapped, your SMTP server provides the message to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the email is finally delivered in the matching mailbox. An SMTP server is necessary if you use some sort of contact page form too, so if you use a free hosting plan, as an example, it is very likely that you won't have the ability to use such a form since many no charge website hosting companies don't allow outgoing emails.