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How to identify and contact the administrator of a web site

Before attempting to contact the administrator of a system, bear in mind that their systems typically serve many users and they may receive large volumes of queries like yours, plus many more spam messages that are sent to their contact addresses by software that harvests their addresses from the sources described below. For your contact to succeed, it should be immediately clear to the administrator

how it is specific to their system
that it is coming from a person and not a program, and
that it includes information that fully defines the problem (see fault reporting)

Website contacts

There is usually an email address through which you can contact the administrator of a web site. Many web sites provide a “Contact Us” page through which you can contact the administrator, and the main page of the site usually links to that page, often through fine print at the bottom of the page or through an “About Us” section.

If you can't find an administrator's contact details on the web site, you can try a typical administrator address which has the form username@domain, e.g. webmaster@example.com, where:

For the username, try webmaster, root, admin, or www-admin.
For the domain, use the name of the web site, but omit any leading “www.” from the domain name, e.g. for www.example.com try emailing webmaster@example.com

Domain name registration

For each domain name, there is a “Registrant”, “Administrative Contact” and “Technical Contact”. The names and contact details for these contacts are stored in the “whois” database, which can be accessed online: whois.

e.g. for the ietf.org domain:

IETF.ORG WHOIS Updated: 1 second ago Registrant Contact Information: Name: IETF Trust Organization: IETF Trust Address 1: 1775 Wiehle Ave City: Reston State: VA Zip: 20190 Country: US Phone: +1.7037289264 Email: @worldnic.com Administrative Contact Information: Name: Ray Pelletier Organization: IETF Trust Address 1: 1775 Wiehle Ave City: Reston State: VA Zip: 20190 Country: US Phone: +1.7037289264 Fax: +1.7037797463 Email: @isoc.org Technical Contact Information: Name: Ray Pelletier Organization: IETF Trust Address 1: 1775 Wiehle Ave City: Reston State: VA Zip: 20190 Country: US Phone: +1.7037289264 Fax: +1.7037797463 Email: @isoc.org Information Updated: Fri, 4 Dec 2009 23:51:57 UTC

Domain name authority

The Domain Name System will hold a “Start Of Authority” (SOA) record for each domain name which provides the email address of the administrator of a DNS zone. You could try contacting the administrator for the zone that includes the domain that you are trying to access.

With Microsoft Windows, open a Command Prompt and use the name server lookup (nslookup) utility:

C:\>nslookup -type=SOA example.com Server: dns.isp.net Address: 216.126.204.65 Non-authoritative answer: example.com primary name server = dns1.icann.org responsible mail addr = hostmaster.icann.org serial = 2009100600 refresh = 7200 (2 hours) retry = 3600 (1 hour) expire = 1209600 (14 days) default TTL = 86400 (1 day) example.com nameserver = a.iana-servers.net example.com nameserver = b.iana-servers.net a.iana-servers.net internet address = 192.0.34.43 b.iana-servers.net internet address = 193.0.0.236 C:\>

Note that the left-most dot in the email address should be replaced with the normal email @ symbol, i.e.

hostmaster.icann.org

becomes

hostmaster@icann.org