There’re a lot of web-based email providers that you can resort to, but having an email address with your own domain name will grant you more credibility if you are running a company, for instance, not to mention that with web-based services there are restrictions on the maximum size of the attachments that you can send or receive. If you use an email service that offers support for the POP3 and IMAP protocols, you will not experience such problems and you will be able to use any program on your PC to access your email messages, including Apple Mail, Thunderbird or Outlook. 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 at your end, but remains on the email server, while with POP3, the message is downloaded on your computer, unless you configure the program in such a way as to leave a copy on the server.