There’re many web-based mail service providers that you can use, but using an email account with your own personal domain name will provide you with more credibility if you have a company, for instance, not to mention that with web-based email services there are limits on the maximum size of the attachments that you can receive or send. In case you use an email service that supports the IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you won’t bump into such problems and you’ll be able to use any software program on your personal computer to check your email accounts, including Outlook, Thunderbird 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 at your end, but remains on the mail server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded onto your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.