There’re many web-based email providers that you can use, but having an email address with your own domain name will provide you with more credibility if you are running a business, for instance, not to mention that with web-based email services there are restrictions on the size of the attachments that you can send or receive. If you use an email service that offers support for the POP3 and IMAP email retrieval protocols, you won’t face such problems and you’ll be able to use any program on your PC to access your mails, including Thunderbird, Apple Mail or Outlook. 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 PC, unless you configure the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.