There are many web-based email service providers that you can resort to, but having a mailbox with your very own personal domain name will give you more credibility if you are running a company, for instance, not to mention that with web-based email services there are restrictions on the size of the attachments that you can receive or send. In case you use an email service that offers support for the IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you will not experience such problems and you’ll be able to use any software program on your PC to access your mailboxes, including Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. You can even set up an email account on your mobile device. The difference between the two email 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 onto your personal computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to save a copy on the server.