There are a lot of web-based mail service providers that you can use, but using an email address with your own personal domain will give you more credibility if you are running a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based email services there are restrictions on the maximum size of the attachments that you can receive or send. If you use an email service that supports the IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you won’t stumble upon such problems and you will be able to use any program on your PC to access your email messages, including Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. You can even set up a mailbox on your smartphone. The difference between the two email 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 on your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.