There are plenty of web-based email providers that you can resort to, but having an email account with your own personal domain name will provide you with more credibility if you have a company, for example, 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 offers support for the IMAP and POP3 email delivery protocols, you won’t face such problems and you will be able to use any software program on your personal computer to check your mails, including Outlook, Apple Mail or Thunderbird. You can even set up a mailbox on your mobile phone. The difference between the two protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed at your end, but remains on the email server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded onto your PC, unless you configure the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.