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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

Your email address is an address that you published in the commit, and you published it in a public place. You can’t really fault someone for trying to get in contact with you via an address you published in a public place.

The message they sent you sounds like a consulting opportunity waiting to happen!

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Spam is spam. Making a commit is not authorization to spam me.

Publishing an email address publicly could reasonably be seen as consent to receive email at that address. GitHub, including commits and those messages, is mostly public (unless you make the repo private, which is free). There are many, many other free and paid alternatives to GitHub.

I agree with you that spam is spam but at the same time the pearl clutching around "omg commit messages" is kind of silly.

If an individual contacts me - "Hey, I saw your commit and was wondering if you could explain X..." - that is fine. That is in the realm of normal human communication. No problem.

If you add my email to your business marketing list and start sending me your "unsolicited bulk commercial mail" then I'm going to:

1. Never do businsss with your company

2. CC your legal and abuse addresses

3. Contact your mail provider and file an abuse notification

The FTC has a wonderful guide on this topic that I encourage you to read.

Fortunately there is a CAN-SPAM act which means we don't have to rely on what the sender or the community thinks is reasonable. Advertisement of a commercial product or anything on a website operated for commercial purposes requires "express consent to receive the message, either in response to a clear and conspicuous request or at the recipient's own initiative". Pretty far from "putting it in a public space", then.

I would argue that there is a difference between low effort bulk spam and what OP received. The message OP received sounds like a fairly tailored request for expert advice, which is a great way to make $100+/hr to answer questions.

If you only want to receive messages from approved contacts, then use whitelists or stick to Facebook Messenger et al.

Obviously we are going off a very small snippet. I agree that if this is a personalized human written snippet, that is a different situation.

I suspect this is a bulk sent marketing campaign. That is not ok.

The message I received was absolutely not "fairly tailored request for expert advice". The rest of it reads:

> That’s exactly what has triggered us to build Language Lens, an AI Co-Pilot for developers.

> So it helps to,

    Information
        Extract core business logic across the applications and modules. Saves hundreds of hours for Business Analysts.
    Data
        The current data size and prediction size, refactor need etc. to defined storage strategy.
    Decision
        Redundant features or must have features in new applications.
    Team’s interest
        Feature and Technical Dependencies view/diagram out-of-the-box – at one place.
    Requirements
        Crystal clear micro level requirement classification.
        Mock it before code it – UI & API.
    Automation
        Defined acceptance criteria with test data.
    Save Efforts
        Generate boilerplate code of desired tech stack.
        Invest more in helping client to migrate/on-board to new platform.
        Simplify application modernization journey.

> Quick 90 second big picture video can be seen at YouTube Language Lens Intro

> I would be happy to hear your thoughts and your input/suggestion of what would you love to see in product further. I would request if you have some time to revert on this email.

> Would you like to take a demo? Please let me know.

It's clearly an advertisement, and not tailored to me in any way whatsoever - a cursory look at my profile should suggest that I'm not interested in any of the above.

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