There’re plenty of web-based email service providers that you can resort to, but having an email address with your own domain will grant you more credibility if you have a business, for instance, not to mention that with web-based services there are limitations on the size of the attachments that you can receive or send. If you use an email service that supports the POP3 and IMAP email retrieval protocols, you will not come across such problems and you will be able to use any program on your computer to access your mailboxes, including Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird. You can even set up a mailbox on your smartphone. The difference between the two email protocols is that with IMAP, an email message is displayed 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 keep a copy on the server.