There are plenty of web-based email service providers that you can use, but having an email with your own personal domain name will grant you more credibility if you are running a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based services there are restrictions on the size of the attachments that you can send or receive. If you use an email service that supports the IMAP and POP3 email delivery protocols, you won’t come across such problems and you will be able to use any program on your computer to check your emails, including Thunderbird, Apple Mail or Outlook. You can even set up an email account on your mobile device. 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, while with POP3, the message is downloaded on your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.