More webmasters basics – this time about how to get someones telephone number, address, and other personal details about them from their domain.

It is actually very easy, and is also a bit of a worry to domain name owners. Anyone can find out their personal data. It shouldn’t be, but it is used for spam and other illegal/immoral uses.

How to do a whois lookup

This is what it is all about – whois (“who is”). If you are on a linux machine, just type “/whois domain.com” in the console. Otherwise the easiest way is to use a website that provides a whois lookup service.

I personally always use whois.sc (now domaintools.com). You can just simply type in whois.sc/thedomainyouwanttolookup.com (this still works even though domaintools now owns it) and you get the whois record.

What if nothing is showing up?

Well, there is this thing called whois protection. It is free on some TLDs (such as .co.uk), but not on most. You can pay a company (usually your registrar) to basically put their contact information inplace of yours. This is often called whois protection. Emails sent to the email listed normally gets forwarded to your email address. If someone uses whois protection, there isn’t much you can do really…