When you create a commit on git, the username and email is associated with the commit. So when someone clones the repository, they can see the list of commits and the associated user. Thus, you can get a list of email addresses. People often use their private email address, so you can be spam. For instance, here's the output of git log on the repo corefx. You can see some email addresses:
GitHub provides a noreply address for every user. For instance, my email is meziantou@users.noreply.github.com. You can find it on the settings page: https://github.com/settings/emails.
Then, you can change your git configuration:
Shell
git config --global user.email meziantou@users.noreply.github.com
git config --global user.name meziantou
If you want to configure only a single repo,
Shell
cd "path to the git repository"
git config user.email meziantou@users.noreply.github.com
git config user.name meziantou
#Rewrite history
Then, you want to replace your email in the previous commits. git provides functionality to rewrite the history of the repository. If you are on Windows, I advise you to use bash as the escape characters are not the same on both systems. If you have not yet configured bash, read this documentation.
Shell
git filter-branch --commit-filter '
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "<Your old email address>" ];
then
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="<Your name>";
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="<Your name>";
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="<Your noreply email address>";
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="<Your noreply email address>";
git commit-tree "$@";
else
git commit-tree "$@";
fi' HEAD
Then, you have to push your changes to the remote repository. You must use --force to overwrite the remote repository.
Shell
git push --force
#Change GitHub settings to block commits containing your email address
Finally, you can configure GitHub to block commits that contain your actual email address. Go into the settings/email section and check the box Block command line pushes that expose my email
Do you have a question or a suggestion about this post? Contact me!
