The masking service is actual masking, not web UI masking.
They allow you to generate a noreply email for your account, and you can configure git to use that email. As long as you do that, your email shouldn’t end up in any git logs, while still being associated to the right account on the Github/Gitlab forge.
Interesting! I didn’t know they also offered that. I was thinking of the feature where they let you keep your email address private in the UI.
That said, the masking you’re talking about wouldn’t have occurred to me because none of my repositories ever begin their lives on github. They only wind up there when I need to share them in an ecosystem that expects it. So a noreply @users.github.com (or wherever) would never make it into my gitconfig in the first place, and I think I’d be too unhappy about tying my email address to one hosting service to ever do that.
To be fair, you can always set something similar up on your own that isn’t tied to any specific forge; you can set your git email to something like sinkhole at domain dot tld, where the domain is one you control.
Then have your mail server put anyone who sends email to the sinkhole address onto a spamlist, as they’re harvesting git logs for emails. Only turn it off temporarily when adding the sinkhole as a commit address to a git forge.
A bit more complicated, but you can genericize the setup.
I also looked it up, and Forgejo apparently also allows you to do this, but it’s controlled by an admin setting and the address you’re meant to use is in a popover (and is only documented in their configuration file). It uses the structure username at noreply dot DOMAIN, with DOMAIN being the domain forgejo is running on. That means pretty much every git hosting tool of note that isn’t just “here’s the repo and a clone url” supports it. (Since selfhosting is pretty much either Gitlab or Forgejo these days.)
The masking service is actual masking, not web UI masking.
They allow you to generate a noreply email for your account, and you can configure git to use that email. As long as you do that, your email shouldn’t end up in any git logs, while still being associated to the right account on the Github/Gitlab forge.
There’s a reference to it here on Github’s site, and the same documentation for gitlab.
score 1 · canonical
Interesting! I didn’t know they also offered that. I was thinking of the feature where they let you keep your email address private in the UI.
That said, the masking you’re talking about wouldn’t have occurred to me because none of my repositories ever begin their lives on github. They only wind up there when I need to share them in an ecosystem that expects it. So a noreply @users.github.com (or wherever) would never make it into my gitconfig in the first place, and I think I’d be too unhappy about tying my email address to one hosting service to ever do that.
score 2 · canonical
To be fair, you can always set something similar up on your own that isn’t tied to any specific forge; you can set your git email to something like sinkhole at domain dot tld, where the domain is one you control.
Then have your mail server put anyone who sends email to the sinkhole address onto a spamlist, as they’re harvesting git logs for emails. Only turn it off temporarily when adding the sinkhole as a commit address to a git forge.
A bit more complicated, but you can genericize the setup.
I also looked it up, and Forgejo apparently also allows you to do this, but it’s controlled by an admin setting and the address you’re meant to use is in a popover (and is only documented in their configuration file). It uses the structure username at noreply dot DOMAIN, with DOMAIN being the domain forgejo is running on. That means pretty much every git hosting tool of note that isn’t just “here’s the repo and a clone url” supports it. (Since selfhosting is pretty much either Gitlab or Forgejo these days.)
score 1 · canonical