There’re plenty of web-based mail service providers that you can use, but having an email account with your very own personal domain name will provide you with more credibility if you have a business, for instance, not to mention that with web-based services there are restrictions on the size of the attachments that you can send or receive. In case you use an email service that offers support for the POP3 and IMAP email protocols, you won’t come across such problems and you’ll be able to use any program on your PC to check your mails, including Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. You can even set up a mailbox on your mobile phone. The difference between the two protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed locally at your end, but remains on the server, while with POP3, the message is downloaded on your PC, unless you set up the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.