What if there’s something illegal, violating copyright, etc. on the site? Or to take a less legal example, what if someone’s site is hacked? You need some way of getting in touch with the owners.
The snail-mail address of the registered agent would suffice. The cost of postage is sufficient to deter the least-determined spammers. And the most-determined spammers would be deterred by the most potentially profitable targets having legal departments handling the mail received by their registered agents.
Atleast in my area websites are also required to carry legal contact information somewhere on the site, which is far easier to secure against spammers than the WHOIS database.
That's fine, you just route to /dev/null everything that goes to the anonymised address; the email headers either won't be re-written or will be re-written a la RFC 5321. Either way you'll be able to easily identify emails sent to the anon email address and dump them on the floor.
> I don't think I ever received legitimate forms of coherent communication over my WHOIS emails.
Given that blog authors increasingly rely on Twitter for feedback (which I don’t use), I occasionally check whois to send notifications about dead links, rendering issues, etc.
Atm I have to expose my email domain, which means some spammers just fire a broadside of this crap.
When it comes from an anonymized email forwarder, I can easily just redirect it into the spam folder.