When you have a hosting account and you set up an e-mail address, you may take the option to send and receive messages for granted, but in fact, this is not always true. Sending email messages isn't necessarily part of the website hosting packages that service providers will offer you and an SMTP service is required to be able to do that. The acronym represents Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the piece of software that enables you to send e-mails. If you work with an e-mail program, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then queries the DNS records of the domain name, that is a part of the receiving address to find out which mail server handles its emails. After some system information is exchanged, your SMTP server provides the e-mail to the remote IMAP or POP server and the email is finally delivered in the corresponding mailbox. An SMTP server is required if you are using some sort of contact form too, so if you use a free of charge hosting plan, for instance, it is very likely that you won't have the ability to use this type of form as most free of charge website hosting companies do not allow outgoing email messages.