There are a lot of web-based email providers that you can resort to, but having a mailbox with your own domain will provide you with more credibility if you are running a company, for example, not to mention that with web-based services there are limits on the size of the attachments that you can receive or send. If you use an email service that offers support for the IMAP and POP3 protocols, you won’t come across such problems and you’ll be able to use any software program on your computer to check your email messages, including Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. You can even set up a mailbox on your mobile phone. The difference between the two email protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed locally at your end, but remains on the mail server, whereas with POP3, the message is downloaded to your PC, unless you set up the program in such a way as to leave a copy on the server.