Keep Your GitHub Email Address Private | Hacker News Reader

Keep Your GitHub Email Address Private

github.com

76 pointsJiPi39 comments

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The fake non-routable emails can be a problem when you have to get in touch with contributors who are no longer active on Github.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

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

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.

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

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.

It's a sign of how spoiled we are that we complain when people try to find us employment.

They're trying to cash in a fat bonus, not getting people a job first and foremost. At least the ones who message me after not reading my profile, just having a single buzzword match.

My guess is people want to feel like coding is something meaningful and worthwhile that they do instead of a lucrative, in-demand job in which they function as an expensive but interchangeable cog.

because there's no unsubscribe. i went through a few recruiting agencies 5 years ago to get a job and now that my contact info is in all these recruiter databases, i get emails and/or phone calls almost daily. Even if I tell one recruiter I'm not interested, there will be a different one bothering me tomorrow. The worst part is that many of them are contacting me about jobs in a city that I don't even live in anymore.

I don't hate them. I welcome recruiters to contact me.

Some developers do not welcome recruiters to contact them, but they get recruiters contacting them anyways.

How does that make them seem any better? People tend not to like sales people as well.

I don't hate them. I have no problem when they contact me through legitimate channels such as LinkedIn or StackOverflow. I even try to respond with a polite 'no' in most cases.

I have a problem with them abusing the git commit logs to get at my personal email as a way of manipulating me.

I'll give you my reasons:

1) I've never had a positive experience with recruiters.

2) They have an observable tendency to embellish your resume for their own purposes, refer you to other recruiters, and network you in soliciting ways that you don't know about at first and don't agree to.

3) They obfuscate the hiring process so that you and a company cannot directly interact without going through the recruiter, and make it difficult to have a candid relationship in the interview process.

4) They only exist as a middleman, adding an extra step to an interview process which I am opposed to on principle.

You're not doing this, but I really hate it when people minimize complaints about recruiters because they think we're spoiled. Those people tend to really not know much about how recruiters operate.

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!

I think many developers complain about recruiters as a way of subtly bragging about how many people want to hire them. Secretly, they'd be kind of disappointed if the emails stopped coming.

Clearly a cousin of the "HumbleBrag", this should be called the "HumbleWhine"...

Boo Hoo, Just Look At Me, What An Awesome Developer I Am, That So Many Recruiters Spam Me With Their Offers

Darn, spoilt rich kids (devs) and their rich problems!

This isn't a fair perspective. Recruiters are legitimately annoying. Especially as many recruiters obfuscate the hiring process so you can't just skip them directly to the company they're fielding. There's a long litany of abuses they take part in quite frequently, ranging from knowingly introducing you to companies you're not qualified for just because you're a "programmer" to deliberately making the hiring process for a company difficult without their direct participation.

When you have a job, maybe you can afford to be annoyed. When you don't, a recruiter is helpful.

I can't really argue with you if you've experienced this, but for what it's worth, all the developers I know professionally have legitimate reasons to dislike recruiters, and avoid them wherever possible.

I think it's unfair that people have their motives for disliking something called into question just because they're in a certain strata that has that problem and not everyone else does.

I'm not trying to say the recruiters are pleasant or anything. I just feel like the amount of complaining about recruiter emails is disproportionate to how inconvenient they actually are.

There's nothing wrong with disliking the emails--a lot of people get recruiter emails and just silently ignore them; a few complain loudly about them, and that's who I'm talking about.

Alright, that's a fair point. I'm in the group that silently ignores and tries to foil them, although I will chime in if people minimize the problem.

Alternatively, quit your whining that you entered a profession where you're not as marketable, and don't minimize the problems people have even if they appear trivial.

I don't think you know much about how recruiters operate...they're very annoying and antagonize the process for small businesses/boutique firms. There is a reason why hiring managers will say they don't want recruiters.

Often, they obfuscate the process so you can't skip them to contact the representative company directly, and they'll embellish your resume in ways that make it impossible for the company to contact you directly.

I am in the camp that considers them more a nuisance than anything for many purposes, and while I appreciate that it might seem nice to be hounded by them, I share the parent's scorn, as I've never had a positive experience with them. And even if I had, it wouldn't invalidate what I've said.

tl;dr - Peoples' problems are peoples' problems. Other peoples' problems don't make them go away.

Alternatively, quit your whining that you entered a profession where you're not as marketable, and don't minimize the problems people have even if they appear trivial.

This being HN, by definition devs are certain to be over-represented, as well as their problems (real or imaginary!).

Also, since I know I am out of my peer group here, I hope that as I learn from fellow HNer's, I can also contribute, however minutely, and in this instance, by sharing perspective from my neck of the woods.

As to marketability, (something you also suggest) it varies across professions and disciplines, and I have no problem with that per se. From where I stand, the problem, as defined by you, and many others in other HN posts over the years, appears akin to complaining of flies when you are drinking from a river of honey.

Of course, there are annoyances in every facet of life, but from where I am looking at things, all I see is a bunch of fat piglets squealing that their milk is cold.

tl;dr - Peoples' problems are peoples' problems. Other peoples' problems don't make them go away, but they sure help provide some much needed PERSPECTIVE!

Actually, a few recruiters found my personal address by scraping AUTHORS files like https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/AUTHORS

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.

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?

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.

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.

I use fake email addresses on all my git contributions.

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.

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

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

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

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

Which is why you shouldn't put a real email address in commits [1].

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address-...

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

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

I can't tell if you're being ironic or not. My question was honest, though. I honestly don't understand this feature.

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.

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