SmartWhois for Advanced Users
Batch Processing, Exchanging Data, Custom Queries, and Other Tips
Now that we've talked about the program's core functionality, let's mention a few other useful things you can do with SmartWhois.
Some users need to query many IP addresses, host names or domains at a time. With SmartWhois, that's really easy. Click File => Open => Batch File => As IP/Hostname List or click File => Open => Batch File => As Domain List to have SmartWhois load and process a multi-line file. You can do the same using command-line arguments, which is described in the help file in detail. Command-line arguments even allow you to launch SmartWhois, have it process the list, save the results to a file and exit, all without any user interaction. There is only one thing to remember: It's a bad idea to overload Whois servers, so if your list contains a few thousand entries, there is a good chance that Whois servers will temporarily block your access to their service. You can, however, use the Options window to adjust the delay between the queries to reduce the server load. Be a good Netizen!
Once you've obtained the required data, there are a number of formats in which you can save the results. If you want to make a quick note of what you've just found, the easiest way is to drag-and-drop the contents of the right pane to the desktop. This will create an HTML file that you can view in your favorite browser. If you want to save many results and/or import the data into some other application, consider one of the other formats supported by SmartWhois, namely XML, XLS, TXT, HTML, or SmartWhois native format. The latter is good when you want to load the saved file into SmartWhois and browse through the results.
Sometimes you need to perform Whois queries using extended syntax. For example, you may need to query a certain handle in a Whois database. This is not a problem: select Query => Custom Query to bring up a Whois Console, with which you are free to connect to any Whois server and send any query string.
