There are lots of web-based mail service providers that you can use, but having a mailbox with your own domain name will grant you more credibility if you have a company, for instance, not to mention that with web-based services there are limits on the maximum size of the attachments that you can send or receive. In case you use an email service that supports the IMAP and POP3 protocols, you won’t experience such problems and you’ll be able to use any program on your personal computer to access your email messages, including Apple Mail, Thunderbird or Outlook. You can even set up an email account on your mobile phone. 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, while with POP3, the message is downloaded on your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to keep a copy on the server.