GitHub - How to find email addresses for most users

You'd like to get in touch with a GitHub user but, e.g., you don't want to post your question as an issue because, e.g., it's not about a specific repository but more generic.

As a result, the problem can be translated into How to find the email address linked to a GitHub account.

Recently, I had this need in order to contact someone with a Docusaurus blog offering a feature that I couldn't find documented on the web. Their blog wasn't on GitHub, but their other repos were.

Using web interface​

Such a tool exists on the web, like https://emailaddress.github.io/. Just copy/paste there and, perhaps, the system will return any used emails associated with this account.

Using parametrized URL​

GitHub provides, in its public API, the list of public events for a given user.

You can retrieve the email using the following URL: https://api.github.com/users/xxxxxx/events/public. Just replace xxxxxx with the GitHub username whose email you wish to retrieve. The response is a JSON array — pipe it through jq to filter the author.email fields and keep the output readable.

Based on a last commit​

The first thing is, for sure, to go to a public repository maintained by this person and to find a commit, any commit in fact, that they've made.

On the main page of the repo, locate f.i. the last commit ID they've made:

Click on the ID and you'll get a new web page with a URL like f.i. https://github.com/<USERNAME>/<REPONAME>/commit/<LONG_COMMIT_ID>. Edit the URL and just append the .patch suffix to it (so now, the URL should be https://github.com/<USERNAME>/<REPONAME>/commit/<LONG_COMMIT_ID>.patch).

Before the suffix was added, this is what the page looked like:

And once added:

As you can see, the email address associated with the GitHub account used to send the commit is now displayed.