Does using an @gmail address reflect poorly on a business?

Does using a email address like the widely popular @gmail, @yahoo, etc., reflect poorly on a business? This is a question I have struggled with for a while now. I tend to run a LOT of websites and thus start to incur a LOT of email addresses. If I had to guess I would say my email program probably has at the very least 50 email addresses it handles. As you can imagine the amount of spam that ends up in there is huge. Even with spam filters working on the various website servers they just aren’t that great and i would say I am still getting a vast majority of spam mail to genuine mail.

Recently I have started to migate away from my custom email addresses with each website towards using standard gmail addresses. When using the services of gmail or yahoo or whomever there are several obvious advantages. It’s very easy to use no matter where you are. Sure my website specific address CAN be accessed via the web but the software isn’t nearly as good as the big boys. Add that to how easy it is to use/sync on my iPhone and you can see why I started to prefer Gmail. Probably the biggest reason are the spam filters. I never, ever, get a single spam email using the Gmail service. I probably have around 10 addresses that I check daily via Gmail and I can’t really recall getting any spam mail. Now if I can only convince them to filter out my mothers FWD’s that would be great.

Problem is I have this nagging feeling that it reflects poorly on my business and me as a business man. So I ask you – if someone handed you a business card and on it it had a gmail address instead of like name@theirconsultingcompany.com – would that turn you off? Chances are people who would be reading this are savvy enough to understand why someone would use that email – but would an average customer? I’m not sure.

Is it worth plodding along and just dealing with the spam so that I have the nice official looking email address, or should I go with efficiency and ease of use and migrate over to Gmail. Ideally I suppose if I could use my custom domain emails on top of the Gmail framework that would be awesome, but I don’t know of any service that offers something like this.

What do you think? I’d love to hear any solutions you have found around this problem!