what is the 'host' for SMTP?

[John Salerno]

Steve R. Hastings wrote:

> Take a look at your email client.  Find where it specifies the server for
> outgoing mail.  Use whatever it says there.
> 
> For example, I am a customer of blarg.net; I am therefore permitted to use
> mail.blarg.net, which has a mail server running on it.  If your ISP is
> example.com, you probably will be using one of these:
> 
> mail.example.com
> smtp.example.com

Thanks for all the information. Very helpful. But I'm still a little 
confused, because it seems like that's not enough information. If all I 
put in is, for example, smtp.gmail.com, how is that directed to my own 
email address? Do I still need to include other, more specific (i.e. 
personal) information elsewhere?