When you have a shared hosting account and you create an email address, you might take the option to send and receive emails for granted, however, this is not always the case. Sending e-mail messages is not necessarily a part of the web hosting plans that providers have and an SMTP service is necessary to be capable to do that. The acronym signifies Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and this is the piece of software that permits you to send e-mails. If you are using an email app, it connects to the SMTP server. The latter then searches the DNS data of the domain name, which is a part of the receiving address to find out which email server handles its email messages. After some system information is exchanged, your SMTP server provides the message to the remote IMAP or POP server and the email is finally delivered in the corresponding mailbox. An SMTP server is necessary if you work with some kind of contact form also, so if you use a no charge hosting plan, for example, it is likely that you will not have the ability to use this type of form since many no charge web hosting providers do not allow outgoing emails.