I've received several similar ones over the years. At this point, if I get an email from someone I don't know and it contains a link, chances are it's spam. I genuinely doubt github(or any other company for that matter) would do something about it. While I fully support GDPR, the truth is, few people are willing to take action knowing how much bureaucracy would be involved...
Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
51–60 of 278 posts
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#52Over many years, I have got email from university for survey / research.
This is not GitHub only, I have got a survey on how my experience interacting with folks on lkml
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#53My solution to this is to use a Github-specific email address. All emails sent to that address which do not originate from GitHub are immediately reported as spam, marked read and deleted. I sometimes use different git/GitHub addresses depending on who I'm working for or specific projects so I can more accurately detect where data is being scraped from.
N.B. Using service-specific emails is trivial - you don't need separate email accounts. Just use email aliases, e.g. "john.smith+github@gmail.com" -- which is an alias called "github" for "john.smith@gmail.com"
Don't spammers have an automatic filter to cleanup that?
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#54YC is a proud investor in Flock, what YC Ethics thing are you talking about?
[flagged]
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#55Maybe a dumb question, but isn't this trivially solved with this .gitconfig?
[user]
name = lordgrenville
email = +lordgrenville@users.noreply.github.comRe: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#56General advice would be to mark the email as spam or junk and hopefully their email platform penalizes them, but this has been working less and less. Email has truly become pay to play now.
That's exactly what I've been doing with solicitation emails, reporting as SPAM on gmail.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#57My solution to this is to use a Github-specific email address. All emails sent to that address which do not originate from GitHub are immediately reported as spam, marked read and deleted. I sometimes use different git/GitHub addresses depending on who I'm working for or specific projects so I can more accurately detect where data is being scraped from.
N.B. Using service-specific emails is trivial - you don't need separate email accounts. Just use email aliases, e.g. "john.smith+github@gmail.com" -- which is an alias called "github" for "john.smith@gmail.com"
A simple regex filter will get rid of that. Now, if you use your own domain and have it configured as a catch-all, then you could do github@domain.tld.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#58Maybe a dumb question, but isn't this trivially solved with this .gitconfig? [user] name = lordgrenville email = +lordgrenville@users.noreply.github.com
Sure, as long as you want to rewrite all of the history of all of your public repositories.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
N.B. Using service-specific emails is trivial - you don't need separate email accounts. Just use email aliases, e.g. "john.smith+github@gmail.com" -- which is an alias called "github" for "john.smith@gmail.com"
Don't spammers have an automatic filter to cleanup that?
You'd have thought so, but no, in my experience this works very well. People doing this kind of spamming don't seem to be particularly bright, nor do they seem to spend any time/effort to clean up their scraped database.
Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users
#60Doesn'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.
Like every other VC firm, the only thing they care about is money. They can pretend to morals, but they will never sacrifice one for the other in any meaningful way.