One thing about gmail addresses...

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/ address : it will make you lose an important distinctive part of your email address, that is its domain name. Within a large email host, you run a much greater chance to have a name clash than within your own ISP. There already are a few 'glaurent' on Orange or free.fr (two of the largest french ISP providers), but on gmail there's a whole lot, and each is bound to get private email that doesn't belong to him if he didn't make his address distinctive enough (I'm pretty sure there's a 'glaurent.gmail@gmail.com' - that one probably gets the cake).

That's another reason to get your own domain name, too :-).