NLC Digital Citizenship Practice Exam

The protocol that plays a critical role in sending emails over the internet is SMTP, which stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is specifically designed for the transmission of email messages from one server to another. When you send an email, your email client (such as Outlook or Gmail) communicates with your email server using SMTP to handle the sending process. This protocol ensures that your message is properly routed to the recipient's email server reliably.

In contrast, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is primarily used for retrieving and managing emails stored on a server, allowing users to access their inboxes from multiple devices while ensuring that changes to their emails are synchronized. HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is mainly utilized for web traffic, serving web pages rather than handling email communications. DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is employed for assigning IP addresses to devices on a network, and it has no direct relation to email transmission. Therefore, SMTP is the correct choice for sending emails via the internet.