There’re lots of web-based email providers that you can resort to, but having a mailbox with your own personal domain name will grant you more credibility if you have a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based email services there are restrictions on the maximum size of the attachments that you can receive or send. If you use an email service that supports the IMAP and POP3 email delivery protocols, you will not run into such problems and you’ll be able to use any program on your personal computer to access your email messages, including Thunderbird, Apple Mail 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 locally at your end, but remains on the server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded onto your computer, unless you configure the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.