There are plenty of web-based email providers that you can use, but having an email address with your own personal domain will grant you more credibility if you are running a company, for instance, 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 POP3 and IMAP email retrieval protocols, you will not encounter such problems and you’ll be able to use any program on your PC to access your email messages, including Thunderbird, Outlook 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 email server, while with POP3, the message is downloaded to your PC, unless you configure the program in such a way as to keep a copy on the server.