There are a lot of web-based email providers that you can use, but having an email address with your own domain name will grant you more credibility if you have 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. In case you use an email service that offers support for the POP3 and IMAP email delivery protocols, you won’t run into 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 an email account on your mobile 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, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded on your personal computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.