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By definition, a domain name has to be owned by someone. But

whois domain doesn’t mean that it is always possible for you to find out the precise details of the owner of any particular domain name.

If the details are publicly available then there are a variety of services that you can use to find out the owner of a domain name.

The overall process of finding out the owner is called a WHOIS lookup.

A quick search in Google will turn up lots of sites that will do this for you, simply by you typing the name into a box on their website – or copying and pasting if your typing isn’t as reliable as you’d like it to be.

Because this process has been abused by spammers over the years, there’s a good chance that you’ll then be asked to solve a CAPTCHA to prove that your human.

Do your best to solve it, even if it takes you more attempts than the computers used by the spammers!

Depending on the registrar and a few other factors, you’ll get a screen of information.

Sometimes this information will be usable, sometimes it will be hidden behind a privacy protection scheme.

In amongst the wealth of technical information, you should be able to find the name of the person or organisation that owns the domain name.

It will also include a street address, which explains those letters that come through the post from companies you’ve never heard of, offering to renew your domain for you when you thought you knew that you’d already ticked the box for this to happen automatically when you originally bought your domain.

It should also include a telephone number, including country code and area code. So you should be able to use that to contact the company if you want to do so.

It should also include an email address. Which explains why spammers like to use these tools. And also explains why the email address is almost always in the format of an image rather than text that you can copy and paste – spammers find it slightly more difficult to cope with that.

Theoretically, a domain can be struck off if the owner information held is wrong. So if you find actual information in the various boxes, it should be correct.

There are a number of cases where this information is held privately rather than publicly available.

For instance, in the United Kingdom, if the owner of a domain elects to opt out of their information being shown publicly then – providing the domain is not being used for commercial purposes – they can do so.

For most other domains, that’s not an option with the main registrar such as ICANN. Which means most domain registrars offer a chargeable option to privatise the domain name information.

It’s at that stage that the WHOIS information ceases to be of use as the address will be one provided by GoDaddy, NameCheap or whoever and the emails will be spam trapped.