There’re many web-based email service providers that you can use, but using an email account with your very own personal domain name will give you more credibility if you have a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based email services there are limits on the size of the attachments that you can send or receive. In case you use an email service that supports the POP3 and IMAP 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 mailboxes, including Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail. You can even set up a mailbox on your mobile phone. The difference between the two email protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed at your end, but remains on the server, while with POP3, the message is downloaded to your personal computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to leave a copy on the server.