SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard for electronic mail (email) transmission. First defined by RFC 821 in 1982, it was last updated in 2008 with Extended SMTP additions by RFC 5321, which is the protocol in widespread use today.

Although electronic mail servers and other mail transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages, user-level client mail applications typically use SMTP only for sending messages to a mail server for relaying. For retrieving messages, client applications usually use either or .

SMTP communication between mail servers uses port 25. Mail clients on the other hand, often submit the outgoing emails to a mail server on port 587. Despite being deprecated, mail providers sometimes still permit the use of nonstandard port 465 for this purpose.

SMTP connections secured by SSL, known as SMTPS, can be made using STARTTLS.

Although proprietary systems (such as Microsoft Exchange and IBM Notes) and webmail systems (such as Outlook.com, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) use their own non-standard protocols to access mail box accounts on their own mail servers, all use SMTP when sending or receiving email from outside their own systems.

Various forms of one-to-one electronic messaging were used in the 1960s. People communicated with one another using systems developed for specific mainframe computers. As more computers were interconnected, especially in the US Government's ARPANET, standards were developed to allow users of different systems to email one another. SMTP grew out of these standards developed during the 1970s.

...
Wikipedia