In case you have a shared website hosting account and you create an e-mail address, you might consider the option to send out and receive emails for granted, but in fact, that isn't always the case. Sending emails is not always part of the web hosting plans that service providers will offer you and an SMTP service is required to be able to do that. The acronym means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the set of scripts that enables you to send out e-mails. If you use an email app, it creates a connection to the SMTP server. The latter then looks up the DNS data of the domain name, which is a part of the receiving address to find out which email server deals with its e-mails. After system information is swapped, 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 kind of contact page form also, so in case you use a free of charge hosting package, as an example, it is very likely that you won't be able to make use of this type of form since many cost-free web hosting providers do not allow outgoing emails.
