There are plenty of web-based email service providers that you can resort to, but using an email account with your own domain will give you more credibility if you are running a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based email services there are limitations on the maximum size of the attachments that you can send or receive. If you use an email service that offers support for the POP3 and IMAP email protocols, you won’t encounter such problems and you’ll be able to use any software program on your PC to check your mails, including Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. You can even set up an email account on your 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, while with POP3, the message is downloaded onto your PC, unless you set up the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.