Except it doesn't look more professional because you could only get smithfamilyemails.com or something equally unmemorable.

3 letter non .com domains are your friend, plenty of those left for cheap

then all those signup forms with bad regular expressions can ruin your afternoon. I maintain an obscure .com only because the various gTLDs i could use regularly fail these naive validations. Some sites dont even properly handle ccTLDs

I really like $LASTNAME.xyz

>and set up a redirect to your @gmail.com address.

What do you recommend for this?

I've been wanting to do this for some time, but that means I either need to:

* Use GMail for work, which does not seem tailored for personal used (it's paid, I can't easilly find the price and it seems a bit odd to use Google solution to avoid problems with Google)

* Send all mails to my personal server and setup a redirect there to GMail (which forces me to make sure that my server is always up, so I might as well use my own mail server)

Is there a better solution? I wish there was some way to define e-mail alias at the DNS level.

I use Gandi's native email redirects. If you use their DNS, you can set up to 1000 redirects from and to whichever email address you want, per domain.