There’re plenty of web-based mail service providers that you can resort to, but having an email address with your own domain name will provide you with more credibility if you have a company, for instance, not to mention that with web-based services there are limitations on the maximum size of the attachments that you can send or receive. If you use an email service that offers support for the IMAP and POP3 email retrieval protocols, you will not bump into such problems and you will be able to use any program on your personal computer to check your email accounts, including Apple Mail, Thunderbird or Outlook. You can even set up a mailbox on your 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 onto your computer, unless you set up the program in such a way as to store a copy on the server.