There’re plenty of web-based email service providers that you can resort to, but using a mailbox with your own personal domain will grant you more credibility if you are running a business, for example, 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 supports the IMAP and POP3 email protocols, you won’t have such problems and you will be able to use any software program on your PC to check your mails, including Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail. You can even set up a mailbox on your smartphone. The difference between the two protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed at your end, but remains on the mail server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded to your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to leave a copy on the server.