How to Extract Emails from WHOIS Data

WHOIS is a publicly accessible database that contains information about the ownership and registration details of domain names. For developers and businesses, extracting email addresses from WHOIS data can be useful for research, outreach, or verifying domain ownership. In this blog, we’ll explore how to extract emails from WHOIS data using a programmatic approach, mainly focusing on how to automate the process.

Why Extract Emails from WHOIS Data?

WHOIS data includes information such as:

• Domain owner details (registrant)
• Administrative and technical contact information
• Dates related to domain registration and expiration

Among these details, emails associated with domain owners or administrators can be particularly useful for marketing, sales outreach, or security investigations.

Prerequisites

Before diving into code, ensure you have:

1. Basic programming knowledge.
2. Access to a WHOIS lookup API or a library in your preferred language.
3. Understanding of the legal restrictions on using WHOIS data, as some jurisdictions may have privacy restrictions.

For this tutorial, we’ll use Python to demonstrate email extraction.

Step 1: Set Up the Environment

First, install the necessary libraries in your Python environment. For querying WHOIS data, we’ll use the whois Python library.

pip install python-whois

To handle and extract email addresses, we’ll also use Python’s built-in re (regular expression) module.

Step 2: Query WHOIS Data

Once the libraries are installed, you can start querying WHOIS data for any domain.

Here’s a basic example to get WHOIS data using the whois library:

import whois

def get_whois_data(domain_name):
    try:
        w = whois.whois(domain_name)
        return w
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error fetching WHOIS data: {e}")
        return None

domain = 'example.com'
whois_data = get_whois_data(domain)
print(whois_data)

This will return all available WHOIS information, including registrant name, contact details, and more.

Step 3: Extract Emails from WHOIS Data

Now that we have the WHOIS data, the next step is to extract the email addresses. Emails can often be found in the emails field or scattered across other contact fields. We’ll use a regular expression to find all email-like patterns in the text.

Here’s a function that extracts emails using regular expressions:

import re

def extract_emails(text):
    email_pattern = r'[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}'
    emails = re.findall(email_pattern, text)
    return emails

Now, let’s apply this to the WHOIS data:

def get_emails_from_whois(whois_data):
    whois_text = str(whois_data)
    emails = extract_emails(whois_text)
    return emails

if whois_data:
    emails = get_emails_from_whois(whois_data)
    print(f"Emails found: {emails}")
else:
    print("No WHOIS data available")

Step 4: Putting It All Together

Here’s the complete code to extract emails from WHOIS data:

import whois
import re

def get_whois_data(domain_name):
    try:
        w = whois.whois(domain_name)
        return w
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error fetching WHOIS data: {e}")
        return None

def extract_emails(text):
    email_pattern = r'[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}'
    emails = re.findall(email_pattern, text)
    return emails

def get_emails_from_whois(whois_data):
    whois_text = str(whois_data)
    emails = extract_emails(whois_text)
    return emails

# Example usage
domain = 'example.com'
whois_data = get_whois_data(domain)

if whois_data:
    emails = get_emails_from_whois(whois_data)
    print(f"Emails found: {emails}")
else:
    print("No WHOIS data available")

Step 5: Avoiding Abuse and Legal Compliance

Keep in mind that some WHOIS data may be protected due to privacy laws such as the GDPR, which affects domains registered in the European Union. Many domain registrars now mask personal contact information, including email addresses, unless you have a legitimate reason to access it.

Always ensure that your usage of WHOIS data complies with local laws and that you’re not using the information for spamming or other unethical purposes.

Conclusion

Extracting emails from WHOIS data can be straightforward with the right tools and techniques. In this tutorial, we used Python and regular expressions to automate the process. This approach is useful for developers who need to collect contact information from domain records for legitimate reasons such as outreach, research, or cybersecurity tasks.

You can adapt this approach to other programming languages or integrate it into a larger data-gathering system.

Feel free to modify the regular expression or WHOIS data handling based on your specific needs.