SMTP

From RemObjects Software

This is a Technical Glossary entry
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The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the standard protocol for transferring email from one host to another.

All internet domains that need to receive incoming email have to expose an MX record in their domain setup and a mail server to receive email. SMTP is a very simple protocol which usually is setup to only accept email for the local domains, though there are servers that can do authentication.

One of the requirements of a mailserver is that the SMTP server is always online. For users this is often not a possibility so the mailserver stores the mail until the user is able to receive it through POP3 or IMAP.