Travel Technology - anyone use gmail as main email with a bunch of forwarding?

I, like a lot of people, have a ton of email accounts. School, work, alumni, etc. etc. What I have been doing for most of them is have them all forward to gmail and then use Thunderbird and pop to check my gmail and sort into the appropriate folders.

This works fairly well except managing identities can be tricky. I'm curious, does anyone use gmail for this purpose and what are your tricks for managing all of the accounts? One of the things I really like is that when on the road in an internet cafe or something I have one place to check all of my mail (also makes using the blackberry easier as I have gmail dump a copy of all emails to the crackberry).

Anyone notice any delays in going from ISPs --> gmail?

I've been using gmail for more than two years now, and haven't noticed delays.

I use it TO forward and to forward TO and it all just seems to work.
I have rules setup to sort mail and to delete the junk, after forwarding, like FT alerts and such so those messages don't clog up the mailboxes.

works great.

I don't use it as a main e-mail address, but I do use it--with forwarding. It works well. I too do not notice any kind of delays.