I too have had my own domain since the beginning of time, or round about when coffee cam went live. I also blagged a few names that seemed like potential projects, and have since sold off for not an awful lot of profit.
There's no way that I'd be without it, freeing me as it does from the tyranny and vagaries of ISP, email providers. There are downsides, though.
- Main one is that you can end up blacklisted, or greylisted either through spammers using your domain as return address or sites saying, "we don' do that little shit'. If you know about it (say, a mail bounces) then it's easy to use your real ISP/gmail if you want, but you may not know about it, as your mail can be dropped.
- if your name is unusual, then it might be actually easier for people to write down if you have eg Ham007@gmail.com vs ham@hamfirstnamelastname.co.uk
- minor one, you are slowing your mail down fractionally