There’re plenty of web-based email service providers that you can use, but having an email account with your own domain name will grant you more credibility if you have a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based services there are limitations on the maximum size of the attachments that you can receive or send. In case you use an email service that supports the IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you won’t run into such problems and you will be able to use any program on your personal computer to access your mails, including Thunderbird, Apple Mail or Outlook. You can even set up a mailbox 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 email server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded to your personal computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to keep a copy on the server.