ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

Okay kiddo, so you know how you write letters to your friends or family? Like when you draw a picture and put it in an envelope, and then your grown-up helps you put a stamp on it and put it in the mailbox?

Well, computers also need a way to send letters to each other, and that’s where something called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP for short, comes in! It’s like a special language that computers use to send emails.

When you want to send an email to someone, you type it up on your computer and hit “send”. Your email program then uses SMTP to find the server that’s responsible for delivering the email to the recipient. Think of a server like a sort of post office for the internet.

Once your email program has found the correct server, it uses SMTP to send a message that basically says “Hey, I have an email to send to this person, can you help me get it to them?” The server then asks for the recipient’s email address, and then uses SMTP again to send the email over to their computer.

It’s important to remember that SMTP is just one part of how email works. There are other things involved, like protocols for receiving emails and keeping track of who sent what. But without SMTP, your email program wouldn’t know how to send your message to the right place – kind of like how a letter wouldn’t get delivered without a post office!