I'm interested in .com domain that is currently registered and parked. The site is parked with buydomains.com so it's showing ads and not much else. The whois lookup has privacy protection applied so can't get any real information. I also tried archive.org for an old site but it's never had anything on it other than ads.

What are the ways of getting in contact with the owner of the domain?

edit: I also tried mx records but it doesn't have any. I searched for the name it showed in the whois lookup and that doesn't turn up much either.

Maybe I'm not reading this right but did you email the address listed?

Assuming you did that and it bounced the best thing to do is probably look up old whois records before it went under privacy. Old address and phone numbers might also be usable as well as looking up the pre privacy listed owner (registrant name) using white pages type services to find current details.

You could also see if the registrar it is with has a domain buy type service. Sometimes they will email an address from their internal records as opposed to whois/contact information.

If you emailed and didn't get a bounce but not response then I'd be sending another email with a dollar figure offer in it (as well as stating the offer amount in the subject line). Would also try sending it from a different email address in case it is not getting there (filtered out etc).

Yep. It was a privacy protected email address - but it hasn't bounced back yet.

How do I do that? Isn't that what privacy protect is for?

Good idea. I assumed the registrar wouldn't hand out that info

I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for your input snoopy

Turns out emailing the privacy protect email address listed in the whois record was all it took. I was always under the impression those protected emails never actually worked? Or are they merely a forwarder?

Yep spot on. It just protects the owner from exposing their actual email to the public, so you learn as little about the registrant as possible. They still get your emails.