There’re plenty of web-based mail service providers that you can resort to, but using an email with your own domain will grant you more credibility if you are running a business, for example, not to mention that with web-based email services there are restrictions on the size of the attachments that you can receive or send. In case you use an email service that supports the POP3 and IMAP email delivery protocols, you won’t run into such problems and you will be able to use any program on your personal computer to access your email accounts, including Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail. You can even set up a mailbox on your phone. The difference between the two protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed locally at your end, but remains on the mail server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded to your PC, unless you set up the program in such a way as to leave a copy on the server.