14 ms·

Keep Your GitHub Email Address Private

76 points by JiPi 13y ago

signed0 13y ago
As someone who's had recruiters find my personal email via my GitHub commits, this is a welcome feature.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- welder 13y 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.
  - jere 13y ago
    It's a sign of how spoiled we are that we complain when people try to find us employment.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      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.
    - wink 13y ago
      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.
  - qntmfred 13y ago
    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.
  - windsurfer 13y ago
    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.
  - publicfig 13y ago
    How does that make them seem any better? People tend not to like sales people as well.
  - signed0 13y ago
    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.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    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.
- shiven 13y 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!
  - bpodgursky 13y ago
    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.
    - shiven 13y ago
      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!
      - dylangs1030 13y ago
        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.
        lsiebert 13y ago
        When you have a job, maybe you can afford to be annoyed. When you don't, a recruiter is helpful.
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
- nonchalance 13y ago
  Actually, a few recruiters found my personal address by scraping AUTHORS files like https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/AUTHORS https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/AUTHORS
nikcub 13y 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 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054
- simonw 13y ago
  This would make it trivial to spam every user of GitHub though, by first spidering the site for public usernames.
- JohnTHaller 13y 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.
MrGando 13y ago
Awesome, lately privacy has become a real concern for me... my inbox filled with Recruiter e-mails will also like this!
mapleoin 13y ago
So how is this different from using any fake email address?
- d0vs 13y ago
  Shut up. Is it necessary to bash every single new feature because it can be done another way?
  - mapleoin 13y ago
    I can't tell if you're being ironic or not. My question was honest, though. I honestly don't understand this feature.
- plorkyeran 13y 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.
stormbrew 13y 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?
- absherwin 13y 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.
- technoweenie 13y 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.
- danielweber 13y ago
  I use fake email addresses on all my git contributions.
- plorkyeran 13y 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.
- csense 13y ago
  Nothing. Which is why I use a fake email in my commits.
smokey42 13y ago
Not going to help. Cloning some public repo will expose all emails you commited with anyway.
- signed0 13y 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.
- csense 13y ago
  Which is why you shouldn't put a real email address in commits [1]. [1] https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address-private https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address-...
absherwin 13y 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.

76 points by JiPi 13y ago

signed0 13y ago

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

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
welder 13y 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.
- jere 13y ago
  It's a sign of how spoiled we are that we complain when people try to find us employment.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    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.
  - wink 13y ago
    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.
- qntmfred 13y ago
  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.
- windsurfer 13y ago
  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.
- publicfig 13y ago
  How does that make them seem any better? People tend not to like sales people as well.
- signed0 13y ago
  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.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  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.
shiven 13y 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!
- bpodgursky 13y ago
  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.
  - shiven 13y ago
    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!
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
      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.
      - lsiebert 13y ago
        When you have a job, maybe you can afford to be annoyed. When you don't, a recruiter is helpful.
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
nonchalance 13y ago
Actually, a few recruiters found my personal address by scraping AUTHORS files like https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/AUTHORS https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/AUTHORS

nikcub 13y 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 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054

simonw 13y ago
This would make it trivial to spam every user of GitHub though, by first spidering the site for public usernames.
JohnTHaller 13y 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.

MrGando 13y ago

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

mapleoin 13y ago

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

d0vs 13y ago
Shut up. Is it necessary to bash every single new feature because it can be done another way?
- mapleoin 13y ago
  I can't tell if you're being ironic or not. My question was honest, though. I honestly don't understand this feature.
plorkyeran 13y 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.

stormbrew 13y 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?

absherwin 13y 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.
technoweenie 13y 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.
danielweber 13y ago
I use fake email addresses on all my git contributions.
plorkyeran 13y 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.
csense 13y ago
Nothing. Which is why I use a fake email in my commits.

smokey42 13y ago

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

signed0 13y 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.
csense 13y ago
Which is why you shouldn't put a real email address in commits [1]. [1] https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address-private https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address-...

absherwin 13y 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.