When you have a cloud website hosting package and you create an e-mail address, you might take the option to send out and receive emails for granted, however, this isn't always the case. Sending e-mails is not necessarily part of the web hosting packages that providers will offer you and an SMTP service is necessary to be able to do that. The acronym means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and that is the software application that enables you to send email messages. If you work with an email application, 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 manages its email messages. After some system data is interchanged, your SMTP server delivers the e-mail to the remote IMAP or POP server and the e-mail is finally delivered in the corresponding mailbox. An SMTP server is needed if you work with some sort of contact form as well, so if you use a free of charge hosting package, for instance, it is very likely that you will not have the ability to use such a form as most free website hosting providers do not allow outgoing e-mail messages.