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Keep Your GitHub Email Address Private

76 points| JiPi | 12 years ago |github.com

39 comments

order

nikcub|12 years ago

The obvious evolution of this would be to host email and allow users to forward:

  username@github.io -> useremail
The fake non-routable emails can be a problem when you have to get in touch with contributors who are no longer active on Github.

Saw this problem in the bootstrap project where we still can't get in touch with ~10% of users to get them to approve the addition of an MIT license:

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054

simonw|12 years ago

This would make it trivial to spam every user of GitHub though, by first spidering the site for public usernames.

JohnTHaller|12 years ago

Which would result in quite a lot of spam sent via GitHub's forwarder, which would then be marked as a spam server in Gmail and other providers, which would result in GitHub's server being blocked.

signed0|12 years ago

As someone who's had recruiters find my personal email via my GitHub commits, this is a welcome feature.

shiven|12 years ago

Thank your choice of profession that you even have this 'problem'.

I would literally dance on my hands if I were hounded (courted?) this way in my choice of profession (bio/pharmaceutical research)!

Hell, if someone knows where else I could put up email, phone and CV to be seen by successful recruiters, please let me know.

Quit the whining and be a bit more thankful for what you do have. Sheesh!

welder|12 years ago

Why does everyone hate recruiters? I'm a developer and I just don't get why other devs hate them so much.

See them for what they are(sales people wanting you as their next product) and get over it.

absherwin|12 years ago

Anyone seriously worried about privacy should also ensure that their gravatar doesn't point to their real email address, especially if there's a simple relationship between the email addresss and GitHub username.

Edit: Apparently, this doesn't re-write the actual repo so anyone seriously interested in e-mail addresses will be unaffected. It was already easier to get e-mails via cloning rather than through scraping or the API.

stormbrew|12 years ago

This seems kind of like privacy theatre to me. What's to stop someone from just cloning your repos and deriving your email from the commit attributes?

plorkyeran|12 years ago

The actual commits will have the fake address. The change isn't that they're hiding the email addresses in the UI; it's that they've added the option to use a fake email address for commits made via the web UI while still receiving notification emails from Github.

technoweenie|12 years ago

You don't need a valid email to commit to your repositories, but you do need one to use GitHub notifications. This feature makes it possible to use the web editor with a fake email address instead of your notifications email address.

absherwin|12 years ago

Absolutely nothing. According to the linked help page, a fake email address must be provided to git config. They'd need a separate copy of the repo with the blinded email address for public access. It's not hard to do but I imagine it would bother repo maintainers that an individual user could cause different repos to be served. Of course, everyone could just decide that email in commits isn't worth the privacy risk. It's a trade-off.

For the curious: Downloading all the repos and extracting email addresses takes 1-2 days and costs <$50 on AWS.

csense|12 years ago

Nothing. Which is why I use a fake email in my commits.

danielweber|12 years ago

I use fake email addresses on all my git contributions.

MrGando|12 years ago

Awesome, lately privacy has become a real concern for me... my inbox filled with Recruiter e-mails will also like this!

smokey42|12 years ago

Not going to help. Cloning some public repo will expose all emails you commited with anyway.

signed0|12 years ago

Good point. I mistakenly thought that they were going to rewrite the email addresses in git commits, it appears that is not the case.

mapleoin|12 years ago

So how is this different from using any fake email address?

plorkyeran|12 years ago

There previously was no way to use a fake email address when making changes from the web UI and still receive email notifications from Github since the same email address was used for both things.

d0vs|12 years ago

Shut up. Is it necessary to bash every single new feature because it can be done another way?