If you have a cloud hosting account 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 true. Sending e-mails is not necessarily a part of the hosting plans that service providers offer and an SMTP service is required to be capable to do that. The acronym represents Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the software application that permits you to send out e-mail messages. If you work with an email app, it creates a connection to the SMTP server. The latter then searches the DNS records of the domain name, that is a part of the receiving address to find out what email server manages its email messages. After some system information is swapped, your SMTP server provides the e-mail to the remote IMAP or POP server and the email is finally delivered in the related mailbox. An SMTP server is necessary if you are using some kind of contact page also, so in case you work with a free hosting package, as an example, it is very likely that you will not be able to make use of such a form since many free website hosting providers don't allow outgoing emails.