WHOIS Lookups are a great way to get contact information for candidates with their own internet domain. If you’ve never utilized a WHOIS Lookup, you’re basically querying a database for information about who registered a specific website. Why would you care about that? When registering a domain name a person is required to provide certain information including a contact name, phone number, address, and email address. Absolutely perfect for tracking down candidates hosting their own sites.
For example, if I run a WHOIS on the URL below:
My WHOIS result looks like:
Pretty sweet?
However, not everything is always pretty in WHOIS land. Often times, a domain registrant will pay an extra fee to have their registration information obfuscated and their contact information run through a proxy, or third party, to maintain a semblance of privacy. In these cases the results are usually a random string of gibberish followed by a super-secure sounding domain name.
But what happens if you actually email those gibberish proxy email addresses?
Turns out they go straight to the email they are trying to hide.
