Look up owner of site on whois

United States
July 16, 2012 8:13pm CST
Are you allowed to contact the owner of a site if you look up their information on whois. Like through email. Let's say you tried contacting them via their website like contact or support. But they fail to respond. Is it illegal to contact them if you obtain their email from whois database?
3 responses
o0jopak0o
@o0jopak0o (6394)
• Philippines
17 Jul 12
looking up whois is legal and contacting them via email is fine. If they don't want to show their email on their whois, they should have kept their whois information private.
1 person likes this
Mylot User
@Sindrum91 (254)
• United States
17 Jul 12
Thank you so much for the information you have provided. A friend of mine is having trouble receiving payment from what i suspect to be a scam site. So I told him to look up the information of the site owner on whois, but I wasn't sure if contacting them would be ok or not.
Hathori
@Hathori (24)
•
27 Apr 13
According to ICANN the whois information are meant to be viewable to public through public whois lookup sites such as http://www.whoisxy.com/ . And the information can be used to contact them in a normal manner (i.e., not to spam their mail boxes).
varier
@varier (5685)
• Indonesia
2 Apr 13
And why is it illegal? If they don't want to show it, they will make their whois private Though I am not sure that he will replies your queries after he fails to reply from his "visible" contact support.