There are many web-based email service providers that you can resort to, but having an email account with your own personal domain name will provide you with more credibility if you have a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based services there are limits on the maximum size of the attachments that you can send or receive. If you use an email service that offers support for the IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you won’t stumble upon such problems and you’ll be able to use any software program on your computer to check your mails, including Thunderbird, Apple Mail or Outlook. You can even set up an email account on your phone. The difference between the two email protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed locally at your end, but remains on the email server, while with POP3, the message is downloaded on your PC, unless you configure the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.