SMTP hosting

Having a domain name and getting proper web hosting services ensure that at least the setup of the website goes smooth. Most of the hassles come with the web hosting services since all the facilities and the features which need to be considered may not have been understood either while opting for the web hosting services, or sometimes, once the website is up and running, there comes a need for some specific enhancements which are not supported with the current hosting plans and thus doing a proper research and understanding the current and possibly future requirements are very important when it comes to selecting a hosting service and the hosting terms and conditions.

One of the most important reasons why people use the internet is to send and receive emails. This medium of communication for the personal or professional purposes is very important and should be considered when opting for the web services. A lot of times for the websites, there can also be internal emails which can be set by the website owners to notify them, when events like some form gets filled, or some email-based action to subscribe or unsubscribe a user gets activated. These emails are handled by the web hosting services using various algorithms and protocols, which each process the incoming emails differently. Due to the complexities and differences in the ways in which the different protocols work, having them implemented on the different web-servers is costly both in terms of money and performance.

The simplest of these protocols is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). The SMTP is used to send the email from the web server to another email address. In normal terms, the SMTP can also be referred to the outgoing mail server. For the SMTP to work there needs to be an SMTP server running on the web server, which processes the outgoing mail for its format and then sends it across. Mainly the SMTP server does the following actions:

1. Verify whether the message configuration is proper, in terms of the email header and such other checks.
2. Verify if the mailer has permissions to send the email using this server.
3. Send the outgoing message to the desired location, and send back an error message if the destination does not exist.

The SMTP is a TCP/IP protocol which generally runs on TCP Port 25. SMTP is also used at the lower level in various other protocols like POP2 and POP3 for sending the outgoing emails. The SMTP was originally also used for receiving the emails, but the problem with this approach is that if the receiving server was down, the message got queued in the sending server and it kept trying to send the mail, till either the receiver came up, or the mail queuing timed out. To overcome this problem, protocols like the POP and the IMAP were designed, which would receive the email as soon as SMTP sends it to the receiver, even if the remote host is down, so that the load on the SMTP server remains low. Thus, with a properly configured SMTP server, the user can send the emails to other users and having a POP3/ IMAP or such other protocol, the user can receive the mail back.

Like all the other email sending protocols, the SMTP can also be password authenticated ot sometimes even open to all users for sending their emails. With a bit of programming skills to change the email headers, a computer geek can fool the SMTP to think that the email originated from a different location or email address as compared to the one it is being sent from. This is a security concern since the emails can be forged and sent from different email addresses. Due to the above problem most of the web hosting providers use some sort of password encryption and authentication which providing access to the SMTP. This extension of authenticating and then allowing the SMTP to send emails was defined as SMTP-AUTH.

Still owing to the above concern a lot of web hosting companies do not give SMTP access at least to the free accounts to ensure lesser misuse of their mail servers. Thus, if the website has a form which needs to get emailed via a mail once it got submitted successfully, the web hosting service being used needs to provide SMTP hosting, and this needs to be discussed as part of the hosting terms and conditions.

In the recent times, there is also an extension of the SMTP called the Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which is being supported by the newer mail servers. The new protocol adds many features like security and authentication to the existing SMTP and also allows the sending of multimedia files. There are also other extensions of the SMTP like the 8BITMIME which also allow sending of the non-ASCII text.