For a while now I’ve been regularly recieving emails on my gmail address which are mistakenly sent to me. Not spam, actual email (and sometimes pretty important too), just sent to the wrong address. I generally make the effort to reply to the sender so that he would know about his mistake, because otherwise there’s no way he’d guess.
And it also seems that many people think ‘g.laurent@gmail.com’ belongs to them. Nope, gmail ignores any dots in the username.
The point of this post is trivial : beyond the obvious online/offline debate (I dislike webapps though I agree they have their use in some cases), here’s another thing you should consider about moving all your email to a gmail/hotmail/
That’s another reason to get your own domain name, too 
.
Well, you should do both:
[1] have a meaningful gmail address. You should never register glaurent but always guillaume.laurent
[2] never use it directly, but via ones of your own domain that are not real inboxes, but dispatchers (forwards) to actual mailboxes, that can be on webmail or your own domain. Take care to set all the From: and Replay-To: of the mailboxes like guillaume.laurent@gmail.com to guillaume.laurent@your-own-domain
Or use Google Apps to provide mail servers for your domain directly.
(I say that, but my own mail using a Google Apps server is currently not responding…)
Chris