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I 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, Gi

I 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 https://github.com/cixtor/emailgetter [2] https://github.com/paulirish/github-email https://github.com/paulirish/github-email

rndgermandude 6y ago
An acquaintance just recently got an email spam about some "network scanner as a service" (sken[dot]ai) because he had starred the bandit network scanner repo. Shady as fuck. Not blaming you, of course.
redeux 6y ago
I also wrote this same program for my work as an product manager working on oss projects, but ultimately decided not to release it publicly due to my own ethical concerns. I use it exclusively to contact folks who "touch" my projects repos, in order to get better feedback on the problems they're encountering, and better understand their use cases. But, I also understood this tool would be very valuable to spammers and generally make the quality of life on GitHub worse. I'm also of the opinion that grabbing people's email through the commit history is at least shady if not outright unethical, even if it's public. Most folks I talk to don't realize that their email is public this way. I tried recently to productize my version of this tool [1], with the caveat that you can only use to contact folks that tough repos you or your organization owns. It hasn't seen much success so far though. [1] https://gitologie.com/ https://gitologie.com/

rndgermandude 6y ago

An acquaintance just recently got an email spam about some "network scanner as a service" (sken[dot]ai) because he had starred the bandit network scanner repo. Shady as fuck. Not blaming you, of course.

redeux 6y ago

I also wrote this same program for my work as an product manager working on oss projects, but ultimately decided not to release it publicly due to my own ethical concerns. I use it exclusively to contact folks who "touch" my projects repos, in order to get better feedback on the problems they're encountering, and better understand their use cases. But, I also understood this tool would be very valuable to spammers and generally make the quality of life on GitHub worse. I'm also of the opinion that grabbing people's email through the commit history is at least shady if not outright unethical, even if it's public. Most folks I talk to don't realize that their email is public this way. I tried recently to productize my version of this tool [1], with the caveat that you can only use to contact folks that tough repos you or your organization owns. It hasn't seen much success so far though. [1] https://gitologie.com/ https://gitologie.com/