There’re a lot of web-based mail service providers that you can resort to, but having an email address with your own domain name will provide you with more credibility if you are running a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based email services there are limits on the maximum size of the attachments that you can send or receive. In case you use an email service that offers support for the IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you will not experience such problems and you will be able to use any program on your personal computer to access your email accounts, including Outlook, Apple Mail or Thunderbird. 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 at your end, but remains on the email server, while with POP3, the message is downloaded on your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.