How do you contact an owner of a site? In the old days you could go to dnsstuff.com and put in the domain name and it would give you contact information. now all you get is ******@sitename.com it seems impossible to get ahold of the owner. Why did this change? Is there a site where you can find out who the owner is like you used to be able to see in the past?
That looks like a whois cloaking of the email address. You should have an option on the website to reveal the full address, or just go to Network Solutions Whois and get it from there.
Hmm well they could have either make their contact info private (very popular nowadays), or DNSstuff.com just does that on their own. I would recommend using a different whois site such as whois.sc, I know that won't block out the e-mail address unless it is set to private.
Since you said there was a site already attached to the name, then you could always try to find an email address on the site and ask them who to contact.
I think it is good to look for another preferred domain in other tld extension, as if you try to solicit, it's obvious he can raise the price.
Have you tried Whois.sc (same as DomainTools.com)? The WHOIS of the original registrar is always a good option as well. However, this may be the case of the owner using Proxy to cloak his contact info.