SLslenk·Apr 10, 2022
There are tools out there that facilitate this: https://github.com/paulirish/github-email
In Tell HN: Startups harvesting GitHub commit emails for marketing purposespaulirish
github-email
Shell2020–2022
paulirish / github-email
github-email
Get a GitHub user's email. :sunglasses: Use this responsibly.
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Get a GitHub user's email. :sunglasses: Use this responsibly.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-11-12 23:15:12 UTC to 2022-04-10 16:30:34 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2020 | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Dec 2020 | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2021 | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2021 | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2021 | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2021 | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2021 | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2021 | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2021 | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2021 | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2021 | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2021 | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2021 | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2022 | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2022 | 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2022 | 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesYes, these kinds of marketing tactics are disgusting and despicable, but the broader issue is why does Github facilitate them by making user emails discoverable? There are tools like github-email [1], which allow you to:
> Retrieve a GitHub user's email even if it's not public. Pulls info from Github user, NPM, activity commits, owned repo commit activity.
Why does Github have so many ways to exfiltrate a user's email address?
[1]https://github.com/paulirish/github-email
In Tell HN: OpenBB scraping GitHub emails for marketing spamI am conflicted with this because I wrote a similar tool in Go five years ago [1], which attempts to find relevant email addresses in the Git commit history, GitHub API, and GitHub profile page. Paul Irish, a Google Chrome Software Engineer, inspired me to create that program. His version is written in Bash [2].
Many people started using my program, and GitHub ended up banning many of them for misbehaving (spamming) other users. I have not updated the code because I do not want to incentivize people to spam, especially IT recruiters, who are not ashamed to use the same tactics to recruit people.
I would encourage @jemmaissroff and everyone else to be mindful and ethical with this type of project.
[1] https://github.com/cixtor/emailgetter
[2] https://github.com/paulirish/github-email
In Show HN: Find GitHub Users' Email Address