The truth is, I chose Probablynot.com after a couple of hours of randomly picking cool sounding words and phrases and finding them all to be taken already. In the end, it came down to Probablynot.com and Definitelymaybe.com. I went with this one, obviously.
When I picked it, I never considered the side effects of having this domain name. The first is that I constantly have to assure people that it is a real domain when I give out my email address. The second is that tons of other people in the world use this domain as a fake domain name for email addresses.
The second effect is really the more interesting one. I’m sure it is partly the reason why my domain gets some of the spam that it does, and why I’ve found my domain blocked on more than one corporate network. But a weird facet of this is that occasionally, randomly, I get people’s passwords. For example, a few of my more recent ones were logins and passwords for photobucket accounts. Unfortunately these are never people with cool pictures, just guys selling stuff on eBay who want to host some photos of their crap.
Its a minor ethical dilemma. They use an email address on my domain as their address… the system emails me a copy of the login and password… does that make it alright for me to log in to their accounts? I didn’t hack it. I didn’t steal it. In fact, the person out there specifically designated me to get email from the website.
Ultimately, it makes me really appreciate sites that require email validation, since they’ll never present me with this problem.