Your hosting service may include the ability to host your own email accounts in your domain (some hosting companies charge extra for this). Earlier, you might have set up a throwaway “no reply” email account in your domain to use with the WP Mail SMTP plugin.
You might like to set up more email addresses for actual use. It’s classier to have your email be name@yourdomain.com rather than using Gmail or Yahoo or whatever. Your domain’s email accounts are also not subject to data mining and other invasions of privacy that occur with free email services.
Email setup is done not from your own website, but from the Site Tools screen of your hosting provider. ||Go to Site Tools, and look for Email.
This function varies between hosting providers, so I can’t give detailed steps, but generally, there’s a screen to manage existing email accounts and create new ones. As usual, choose a hard-to-guess password you aren’t using anywhere else. This is not the same as any of the other logins associated with your website.
The email page generally includes controls to set quotas, links to where email can be read online in a web browser, and information on how to configure an email “client” program to fetch email from the server.
Your smartphone is an email client, or you could install an email program on your PC. I use Thunderbird, which is free and keeps a complete offline backup copy of the email. Thunderbird is also easier than reading email in a web browser, and you can add multiple accounts to it so all your email is in one place, but still can read email for just one account at a time if you want to.
If you do set up an email client, follow the instructions for “IMAP over SSL/TLS,” which is the most secure (and the default for most email clients). This method also has the advantage that if you delete an email from one device, or move it to a folder, it carries out the same action everywhere, so you don’t waste time dealing with the same message more than once.
If you only read your email online, the only copy of it is on the hosting company’s server, and if you have a dispute with them you might lose access to it. Use Thunderbird or another email client to keep a local copy of your mail.