There are plenty of web-based email providers that you can resort to, but using an email address with your own domain will provide you with 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 IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you won’t run into such problems and you will be able to use any software program on your computer to check your emails, including Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. You can even set up an email account on your mobile device. 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 on your personal computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to leave a copy on the server.