Hi HN,

I recently noticed that an YC company (Run ANywhere, W26) sent me the following email:

From: Aditya <aditya@buildrunanywhere.org>

Subject: Mikołaj, think you'd like this

[snip]

Hi Mikołaj,

I found your GitHub and thought you might like what we're building.

[snip]

I have also received a deluge of similar emails from another AI company, Voice.AI (doesn't seem to be YC affiliated). These emails indicate that those companies scrape people's Github activity, and if they notice users contributing to repos in their field of business, send marketing emails to those users without receiving their consent. My guess is that they use commit metadata for this purpose. This includes recipients under the GDPR (AKA me).

I've sent complaints to both organizations, no response so far.

I have just contacted both Github and YC Ethics on this issue, I'll update here if I get a response.

Martin from GitHub here. This type of behaviour is explicitly against the GitHub terms of service, when we catch the accounts doing this we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts. It's a game of whack-a-mole for sure, and it's not just start-ups that take part in this sketchy behaviour to be honest. I've been plenty of examples in my time across the board.

The fundamental nature of Git makes this pretty easy for folks to scrape data from open source repositories. It's against our terms of service and those folks might want to talk with some lawyers about doing it - but as every Git commit contains your name and email address in the commit data it's not technically difficult even if it is unethical.

From the early days we've added features to help users anonymise their email addresses for commits posted to GitHub. Basically, you configure your local Git client to use your 'no-reply' email address in commits and that still links back to your GitHub account when you push: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/reference/ema...

I think that's still probably the best route. We want to keep open source data as open as possible, so I don't think locking down API's etc is the right route. We do throttle API requests and scraping traffic, but then again there have been plenty of posts here over the years from people annoyed at hitting those limits so it's definitely a balancing act. Love to know what folks here think though.

My 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 unread 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.

I've spent a lot of my career marketing to developers, and spamming their GitHub account might be top 1 or 2 worst marketing tactics you can use.

Cold emailing rarely works by itself. Cold emailing developers via emails you pulled from their GitHub accounts? At that point, you're actively harming your brand, and may as well just send them spam diet pill ads.

YC is a proud investor in Flock, what YC Ethics thing are you talking about?

This happens all the time, not really surprised as the GitHub API makes it pretty easy to extract valuable leads with real and confirmed email addresses.

This is atleast fine as it's just spam, I got pulled into an actual scam and it never made it to the frontpage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45357205

Email address privacy is a feature offered by Github and replaces your day to day email: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/email...

Doesn'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.

I remember this being discussed a while ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9332418 (11 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20660624 (7 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27855152 (5 years ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30900237 (4 years ago)

Seems it’s a reoccurring issue

I have received over the years so much spam of this kind by multiple YC-funded companies that I now reflexively send to spam any email that mentions being YC-funded, regardless of how legitimate the email is.

General 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.

There's no reason to put your real email in git config unless you're signing, in which case repos should be private. I would have thought that was obvious.

I've received the exact same email from the same company.

I was also spammed (twice) by voice.ai.

You mention GDPR, which also "applies" to me, though I wonder if what they're doing is actually illegal. I mean, after all, I'm putting my email on GitHub precisely to give people a way to contact me.

Of course, I do that naïvely, assuming good faith, not expecting _companies_ to use it to spam me. So definitely what they're doing is, at the very least, in poor taste.

I’m not especially bothered by this [yet -AI is likely to make this worse]. It’s a fairly insignificant component of my spam catcher. At least, it’s a bit focused.

Every day, I get deluged with hundreds of spam and scam emails, often because some knucklehead entered my email in a form (either accidentally, or as a throwaway red herring).

I usually check the "Received" header and report to the email service provider. Once in a while I receive a response saying the case is properly handled.

These providers are the only ones that care about their reputation and thus may take some action. Investors? Nope.

This sounded familiar, so I checked my inbox and I did indeed receive a similar email from sanchitmonga@runanywheresdk.com earlier this month:

> I came across your GitHub profile and thought you might be interested in what my team and I are building. We're developing an open source SDK that runs LLMs directly on-device.

What's even more interesting is that both buildrunanywhere.org and runanywheresdk.com show a stock hostinger parking page when accessed in a browser. Something tells me they're intentionally registering these "alternate" domains specifically for spam, to avoid tanking the email reputation of their main runanywhere.ai domain.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised given YC is going all in on AI and most AI companies are no better than the crypto scammers of yesteryear, but still.

I have been having the same experience. If you starred a GitHub repo, and they think that their product is similar, they will send you their spam. I condemn this! They should be ashamed!

> These emails indicate that those companies scrape people's Github activity, and if they notice users contributing to repos in their field of business, send marketing emails to those users without receiving their consent. My guess is that they use commit metadata for this purpose.

There are likely marketing email datasets floating around the internet that contain email addresses scraped from commit metadata.

I use a catchall with a specific Git client (not GitHub) email address, and found spam and phishing emails being sent there quite a few times.