There are plenty of web-based email service providers that you can use, but having an email with your own domain will grant you more credibility if you have a company, for instance, not to mention that with web-based email services there are limitations on the size of the attachments that you can receive or send. In case you use an email service that offers support for the IMAP and POP3 protocols, you won’t stumble upon such problems and you will be able to use any program on your PC to check your email messages, including Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. You can even set up an email account on your smartphone. The difference between the two protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed locally at your end, but remains on the email server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded onto your PC, unless you set up the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.