Gmail may be nice with the 2.5 Gigs account but don't start complaining about your privacy when you find out that Google logs everything they can about you. Connecting your Email contacts and contents plus your search history and GooglePrint and whatever gives a pretty thorough picture of a person. And you can't be sure that everything isn't given away to the government or stolen from them by hackers.
Distribution of knowledge is your only tool against it. You shouldn't give everything to one provider.
I have several mail accounts. My main mail accounts are AOL but I use Thunderbird to access and store them.