There are many web-based mail service providers that you can resort to, but having an email account with your own personal domain will give you more credibility if you have a company, for instance, not to mention that with web-based services there are restrictions on the size of the attachments that you can receive or send. In case you use an email service that supports the POP3 and IMAP email retrieval protocols, you will not stumble upon such problems and you will be able to use any program on your computer to access your mails, 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 at your end, but remains on the server, while with POP3, the message is downloaded onto your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to leave a copy on the server.