44net-request@hamradio.ucsd.edu wrote:

Last time I tried doing whois on a name it failed. The spammers have made it impossible to put up a whois because they mined them all for valid emails so organizations had to abandon it.

Maybe it varies between TLDs. I never got much spam that I could trace to .nl domain name registration (note that .nl now no longer reveals contact info via whois, but they used to in the past).

On the other hand, what really buried me in spam is registering for some port numbers and a organization unique ID at IANA. They published the requester's mail in a text file on their site, and for port numbers it is in /etc/services. I have had to abandon some mail addresses because of it.

Rob