My problem with a catch-all was that there is a lot of spam that gets send to various common email addresses such as "admin". Do you maintain a blacklist for your users?
I have a regular expression set as a username in my database of email addresses. (spoilers: it's just somesalt.*."2 or 3 characters" so for example [email protected]). So I can sign up to any random website by just entering salt.thatwebsite.tld@me as my email. That's the zero-configuration part. Honestly, this is worth paying $9/year for imho :P
The personal and and professional mail together is simply internally forwarding my professional mail to the same imap instance but a different folder :P. It's mostly future-proofing on my part. If I were to get/manage a different domain-name (say a gaming guild or business venture) I could merge those too and not have to set-up 27 different accounts in my email client.
Right now my approach is to have a [catch-all]@domain.tld enabled, and then build rules for individual domains i want to blacklist.
However sounds like you figured out a nice setup that works for you. So you are not the target audience anyway :)
Cant say anything against Fastmail tho, except surely we are cheaper as we dont have to provide these kind of interfaces and space.
> personal and professional mail on the same account
This is a self plug, however this is exactly what i made https://ForwardMX.io for, doing all this within Gmail for the lazy :)