A chrome extension to hunt email addresses for any Github user or repository. Great for networking, reaching out to people with questions, or getting in touch with open source maintainers.

This extension was inspired by more general purpose email hunters like RocketReach and Hunter, which scrape the internet for emails. They have limited free plans, but likely aren't sourcing emails from git commits. This extension is limited to Github, but it is fully free.

How we find emails

Basically, all commits to a git repository have an email associated with them. You might not know this when posting your code to Github, but your email is there by default. Github has a feature to hide your email with a private relay, but that only works for commits you make via their web interface (pull requests etc.). If you enable Github's private option, some of your commits will have an email that looks like this:

<your_username>@users.noreply.github.com

This extension filters those emails out by default, since they're not useful. If you really want to hide your email for all commits, you can enable another Github feature that prevents any non-anonymized emails from accidentally being pushed to your repo.

Anyway, this extension takes advantage of the open nature of git and Github to find users' email addresses. We do this through two methods:

1. The github API. for any user, you can visit [https://api.github.com/users/<username>/events/](https://api.github.com/users/<username>/events/) to see a user's recent activity. This doesn't always work, especially if they use the email forwarding feature.
2. git clone & git log. Anyone can clone any public repo and see the commit history, along with emails, with git log. We run a function that does this for any user, then returns the results. This is a more thorough method, but it's slower and may be noisier, especially for repositories with many contributors.

If you find that the extension is returning too many irrelevant emails, you'll soon be able to toggle simple vs. advanced query mode. Simple mode will pull from method 1 only, and advanced mode will pull from method 1 & 2.

We don't extract any private data, we just make it easier to discover what is already posted publicly. You could run the above steps yourself, but this extension is a one click solution.

Usage Tips

If you open the popup from a valid Github url (either a user's page or a repo page), the extension will automatically start fetching. A user url will fetch emails for that user, and a repo url will fetch emails associated with that repo specifically.

If trying a user's url returns too many irrelevant results, try running the extension from a few of their repos, preferably small ones that have few contributors – these are most likely to only contain that user's email.

Feedback

Please reach out to me, benedelstein, with any feedback, comments, or questions. I'll leave it to you to find my email address.