When a person registers a domain such as “myown.com”, he/she is required to enter their public whois contact information so that anyone can contact the owner if a website is down or doesn’t have their contact email or at least a form. Since the domain registrar doesn’t really verify if the public whois information is accurate or not, many people simply enter bogus information such as “123 Fake St.” or “(555) 555-5555″. Actually it is wrong to provide fake whois details and if someone found out about it and reported the fake whois information to Internic, the domain owner will risk loosing the domain name. So, many people opted for Whois Privacy Guard for a few dollars a year where the information will be replaced by a generic Whois Guard contact information.

Don’t get me wrong, it is still possible to contact the domain owner even if the domain is being protected by WhoisGuard. When some one sends an email to your uniquely generated whoisguard email address, it will in-turn forward it your real email address which you specify. This essentially masks your email from the outside world. However, if you want to know the real name, address, email and contact number of a domain, it is also “possible” to dig out all that information using DomainTools Domain History service.

Domain Tools has been tracking the whois history of millions of domains since 1995. Domain History gives you access to our massive database of historical whois records. All you need to do is enter the domain name, click the “Look up” button and all records found will be displayed. Domain Tools used to offer 10 day free trial to use this service but they’ve stopped offering that because anyone could just sign up for a 10 day free trial, fully use DomainTools services and then cancel the trial account on the last day of trial. They now offer a free account signups where you can get unlimited Whois access, Domain Searching and Domain Suggestions, as well as Domain Monitor for up to 1,000 domains but not for Domain History.

If you want to use Domain History, you will need to pay $15 a month to sign up for a Silver membership. This Silver membership gives you 10 units and Domain History feature uses 7 units. Each service offered by Domain Tools are counted in units. If you want to use another service and do not have enough units, you need to first deactivate the current service so that you get back the units to activate the other service. Do note that some service cannot be deactivated instantly and you need to wait for 30 days. So make sure you activate the service wisely.

Here are some test I did with Domain Tools Domain History.

Domain: raymond.cc
Domain created on registrar: 14-March-2003
First record on Domain History: 11-October-2006
First Article on Blog: 3-October-2005

Domain: ghacks.net
Domain created on registrar: 3-October-2005
First record on Domain History: 30-October-2005
First Article on Blog: 3-October-2005

Domain: for-free-on-internet.com
Domain created on registrar: 21-September-2008
First record on Domain History: 22-September-2008
First Article on Blog: 16-August-2008

Domain: nirmaltv.com
Domain created on registrar: 12-March-2007
First record on Domain History: 13-June-2007
First Article on Blog: 2-October-2005

Domain: liewcf.com
Domain created on registrar: 1-March-2004
First record on Domain History: 11-March-2004
First Article on Blog: 8-March-2004

Domain: labnol.org
Domain created on registrar: 15-December-2006
First record on Domain History: 14-January-2007
First Article on Blog: 7-October-2007

Domain: mydigitallife.info
Domain created on registrar: 27-December-2005
First record on Domain History: 22-March-2006
First Article on Blog: 18-October-2005

Domain: fengshuiheritage.com
Domain created on registrar: 24-March-2007
First record on Domain History: 14-December-2007
First Article on Blog: 28-March-2007

Using DomainTools Domain History search, I was able to dig out mydigitallife’s old whois information displaying the name, address, email and even the contact number of the owner even if it is currently being masked by PrivacyProtect. This service might not be perfect because if you register a domain from namecheap, they automatically bundle WhoisGuard for free. Other than that, as you can see from the test I did, DomainTools crawler is not always fast enough to crawl on a newly registered domain name to record down the whois information. Wanted to post this yesterday but ended up helping my mother clean the house for Lunar New Year. Here’s wishing all Chinese a very happy and prosperous new year!

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[tags]whois, privacy, domain, history, cache[/tags]