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Loads of people do this, and that is exactly why WHOIS is becoming completely useless and needs to be "fixed". One possibility is to include a turing test, an email to the person who wants to contact the (owner|admin|billing) contact of a domain for tracking purposes, which then needs to be replied to, or something like that. Not all that much is needed to make it too costly for spammers.

Ketil

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Personal Names - get your .name

That's not correct, WHOIS Privacy Protection does exactly that, where some proxy information is put into whois instead of the registrant information. The proxy is obviously obliged to forward important messages to the owner of the domain. This is even free with some registrars.

Ketil

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Personal Names - get your .name

That's why you should use a registrar that provides WHOIS Privacy Protection. They can change your details for you, but they also have an obligation to actually receive emails/phonecalls and forward this information to the registrant if necessary. This costs money some places, but not all.

Ketil

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Personal Names - get your .name

I don't agree. It can easily be made possible to contact a person without giving away the email address. Picture this:

A webpage, you type in the domain, check the box with which contact you want to email. Write in your own email, write in a short message what this is about, and click submit. The owner of the domain now has an option to write you back, without ever having lost his privacy.

If you want to call him, you can receive the number by mail, and that way you can be tracked (and stopped/held to justice if you are a nasty, evil wrongdoer).

Ketil

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Personal Names - get your .name

If that is the case, how do you account for the fact that some registrars have services to protect WHOIS privacy? If your registrar doesn't have any privacy protection options, perhaps you should transfer?

As for the problem of contacting the owner of a domain in case there really is a need, it should be made to be a manual job. One way to do this could be a contact web page with the registry or registrar (possibly containing a turing test), where someone can send a short request to the owner of the domain (without ever getting the email address), and the owner of the domain can then write back. This web page can then have various rules, like max 1 message to each domain, max 10 messages per hour (or whatever is responsible), which will severely limit spamming.

Ketil
Personal Names - get your .name

A lot of registrars offer WHOIS Privacy Protection, but this usually costs almost as much as the domain it self. However, Personal Names (a registrar specializing in .name), does WHOIS Privacy Protection as part of the standard service (ie. no extra charge) and I think this should be the default of all registrars. But I doubt that will happen any time soon.

Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names.