Is Retrieving Whois Emails Illegal?

[barrysanders]

If you want to contact end users to ask if they would be interested in obtaining your domain name, and your means of contacting them is to find sites through Google, and then retrieve their Whois email, is this considered illegal?

And would it matter if I searched for the whois by hand versus if I built a bot to retrieve the whois emails?

[Mark Talbot]

That is publically available information, required by contract of buying a domain name.

I dont think it is illegal per se', but I wouldnt spam anybody. Bots do whois email harvesting all the time.

[draggar]

I get emails all the time offering to sell me their crap domains for a lot of money. If it is illegal it isn't enforced.

Luckily, I have a SPAM button.

[KING dot NET]

I agree with draggar.

Using the information e.g. email address and sending spam is a different story.