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Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

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Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#241

Post by keiferski »

RandallBrown wrote: post #174
keiferski wrote: post #45

I've spent a lot of my career marketing to developers, and spamming their GitHub account might be top 1 or 2 worst marketing tactics you can use. Cold emailing rarely works by itself. Cold emailing developers via emails you pulled from their GitHub accounts? At that point, you're actively harming your brand, and may as well just send them spam diet pill ads.

If someone took the time to look through my GitHub contributions then pitched me with a job relevant to that work I would absolutely consider them. That's exactly the kind of recruiter I would like to work with. If it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.

Yeah I mean as a marketing tactic to sell your product. An employer / recruiter offering you work this way is different.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#242

Post by grepfru_it »

tedivm wrote: post #219
eli wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. How do you know what account scraped your email address from github in order to send you an email? Or do you mean going after the accounts of companies that make use of a likely scraped email address? That's not a bad idea either, but it has risks and isn't the same thing.

Half the time they literally say it in the email. I just looked in my spam folder and just a few hours ago got an email titled "Your profile: Github", that started with: > I came across your profile on GitHub. Given you're based in the US, I thought it might be relevant to reach out. > > Profile: https://github.com/tedivm They aren't doing anything to hide it.

But hold on.

They could have git cloned your repo, used or otherwise analyzed your code which follows TOS then used the local git repo to pull your email address.

How is GitHub responsible here?

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#243

Post by grepfru_it »

mardef wrote: post #172
cortesoft wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trillion dollar marketshare? How big do you think GitHub is?

GitHub is wholly owned by Microsoft, which has a 3 trillion market cap

When I left, GH was valued at around $40 billion. Above the $8B they were purchased for. Well below $1T that is claimed

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#244

Post by Rapzid »

david_allison wrote: post #177
martinwoodward wrote: post #31

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board. The fundamental natur…

> when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. This isn't my experience. I requested that you looked into a spammer in July 2025, you ignored my reply and the account is still active. ---- Thank you so much for the report. We're sorry to hear you're receiving unwanted emails, but it's always a possibility when your public contact information…

Yeah they likely rarely if ever "look into" it and certainly nobody has ever needed a lawyer over this.

As recently as a year or so ago, at least, you could list repo stargazers through their graphQL API and get a TON of email off that depending on the user settings.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#245

Post by Rapzid »

WhatsName wrote: post #29

Doesn't YC have some code of conduct or legal/ethical guidelines? I would assume a legal and compliance department would have some major headache if documented cases of misconduct jeopardize later due diligence. I would not fund or aquire a company on the radar of national regulatory bodies for something as stupid as this.

If it were taking up time and not producing results then they would care.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#248

Post by roryirvine »

callamdelaney wrote: post #100

YC is basically advising their startups to engage in shitty business practices, like trying to hire UK staff for half the salary and expecting 7 day weeks.

Interesting - it tracks with personal experience.

Honestly, I'd chalked it up as a one-off mistake by an inexperienced team (I had discussed my expected range in our first conversation, so found it odd that they they would waste their own time going through the hiring process only to make me such a stupidly low offer!)

So is this something that they're actually being advised to do? What's the intention behind it?

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#249

Post by foldr »

shunia_huang wrote: post #237
foldr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar one from that guy asking me to make open source PRs to some repo of theirs for, err, $25-50/hour. I replied explaining that senior software engineers in the UK aren’t quite as desperately poor as that, and got a canned response saying that they were looking forward to reviewing my PRs :D

Blows my mind that you guys are so expensive lol.

SWE salaries in the UK are fairly unsurprising as they tend to be more or less in the range of other professional salaries. If they’re high from a worldwide point of view that’s just because most of us are in London and London is a high cost of living city.
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