There’re a lot of web-based mail service providers that you can resort to, but having an email account with your very own personal domain 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 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 experience such problems and you will be able to use any program on your computer to access your email accounts, including Thunderbird, Apple Mail or Outlook. You can even set up a mailbox on your phone. The difference between the two 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 onto your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.