Loosing all contributions by changing primary email address of github account #21616
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I have added a new email address to GitHub account and deleted my old primary email address from account. Now organizations don’t show me as a collaborator of repos. But commits are there. And all contributions are gone from my contribution time line of my profile as well. Is there anyway to recover this ? |
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Replies: 14 comments 2 replies
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👋 Welcome! Any commits that used your old primary email address will no longer be associated with your account if you no longer have that email address associated with your account. To revert, you would have to add that email address back and verify it. It doesn’t have to be your primary email address. To prevent this becoming a problem in the future, especially if you are using an email address that is attached to a school or workplace, you can choose to select our email privacy feature and use a GitHub provided address for all of your commits. This isn’t a functional email address, but a way of associating your commits directly with your GitHub account instead of with a specific email address. |
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What if that removed primary email was old and unaccessible , due to that I’m not able to verify the email address. |
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Try adding it without verifying - it might still work. |
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yup, simply add without verifying it, I did that, it’s working |
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@canuckjacq Thanks , @jdevstatic yes it is, thanks |
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@canuckjacq, is this not a security hole? What if, for example, I know a certain programmer and the email account he is using, if I want to get his commits, I can do so by simply adding the email without verifying it, right? But, of course, I will not do that, I’m just exposing the security issue here. Unless, GitHub marks emails that should be used once, for example, if my old email is added to my account and I cannot access that anymore but I added it without verifying it, then another user used that also after the authentic user added it, the second user will not be allowed because the email is already associated with the valid GitHub user, even though he did not verify it. Hopefully, this will be added if there is none. |
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I can’t see where it would be a security risk. If someone is super hung up on clocking up meaningless commits there are definitely simpler ways to go about that using your own email address. You can’t add an email address to your account if it is already on another account - verified or not. Additionally, if someone adds your email address to their GitHub account, you can ask support to remove it. |
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canuckjacq:
this is what I’m referring to, this is great so that it’s sure, this was not mentioned in the documentation, thanks for the reply, |
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@canuckjacq Does it take time to get the commits back? I removed my primary email the other day, after I noticed I lost my commits I added it back, that was one day ago but till now I still don't see my lost commits back. |
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@EtoDemerzel0427 faced the same issue here while changing primary address. I deleted the email address, the saw all contributions count made from that email was lost. Added the email back, verified it and made it as a primary email account. Able to see all contribution count back. Key here is to make it primary again. Later when you see the contribution count change the primary email as per your needs, just do not delete that account from github. Its ok to keep it un-verified for the commits to be seen, but do not delete it. |
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@vatsa287 Yes I did see it back, though it took three days in my case, not sure why it was so long. |
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I have signed up for GitHub using my edu email what will happen once I no longer have access to it. Will I lose my account or contributions completely? Is there any way around to prevent it. Initially I had signed up using edu email to avail the GitHub developer benefits. What should I do now. I have added a backup account. |
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I normally use github private emails to commit in my machine, when I brought a new machine, I unfortunately set my personal email id and I made some contribution in some repos, and then I realise I use private email for github. I contributed to the repos but My contributions are not available or not shown in the contributors tab in that repos, Is there any way other way to retrive that. |
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👋 Welcome!
Any commits that used your old primary email address will no longer be associated with your account if you no longer have that email address associated with your account.
To revert, you would have to add that email address back and verify it. It doesn’t have to be your primary email address.
To prevent this becoming a problem in the future, especially if you are using an email address that is attached to a school or workplace, you can choose to select our email privacy feature and use a GitHub provided address for all of your commits. This isn’t a functional email address, but a way of associating your commits directly with your GitHub account instead of with a specific email a…