There’re a lot of web-based email providers that you can use, but having an email account with your own domain will grant you more credibility if you have a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based email services there are limitations on the maximum size of the attachments that you can receive or send. If you use an email service that supports the POP3 and IMAP email delivery protocols, you won’t face such problems and you’ll be able to use any software program on your PC to check your email messages, including Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. You can even set up a mailbox on your smartphone. The difference between the two protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed locally at your end, but remains on the server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded to your PC, unless you set up the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.