If you have a hosting plan and you set up an e-mail address, you might consider the option to send and receive emails for granted, however, this is not always the case. Sending e-mail messages is not always part of the hosting plans that service providers feature and an SMTP service is necessary to be able to do that. The abbreviation represents Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and that is the software application that enables you to send e-mails. If you are using an e-mail application, 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 deals with its email messages. After some system information is swapped, your SMTP server provides the email to the remote IMAP or POP server and then the email is finally delivered in the corresponding mailbox. An SMTP server is required if you work with some sort of contact page form also, so if you use a cost-free hosting package, for example, it is likely that you won't have the ability to use this type of form as many no charge web hosting companies do not allow outgoing e-mails.