Commits getting associated with a different GitHub account

[BartTK]

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In my latest private repository, GitHub associated all my commits with a different GitHub account. When I look at git log locally on my PC, it show my username. However, it seems I made a copy/paste error in the anonimized email address from GitHub. Apparently I missed the first digit of the number in front of that address. I've fixed my email address for future commits.

But what about the old commits?

First of all I find it odd that GitHub associates them with a completely different account. That other account cannot be using that incorrect email address as it does have my GitHub username in it. Bug?

Does this also mean that this other user can now see/access these commits? Collaborator settings of the specific private repository shows there are no collaborators with direct access.

[davevad93]

Hi @BartTK ,

When you push with the correct username but with an incorrect email address, the commit isn't actually associated with any account as it doesn't exist, you may see your username with a blank profile picture, which basically means it's a non-existent account, so you don't have to worry about that.

As for your old commits, changing the author of the last commit is fairly easy by running git commit --amend --author="Your Name <[email protected]>" (with "Your Name" being your real username and "[email protected]" being your real email address). Changing multiple old commits is a bit more tricky, take a look at this, it's a guide on how to do it, however I've never done it to be honest so I advise you to make a copy of your local repo to test if it works before making unwanted changes to your main repo.

[BartTK]

Assigning the commits to some kind of blank/dummy/empty account as you describe it, would have made sense to me. However, the commits are getting assigned to what seems like a real account. It has a username (that doesn't look anything like my own username), I can open the profile of that account...

To be honest, I am not worried too much about these specific commits. It isn't some top-secret repo ;-). So I am not going to bother rewriting the history here. But thanks for the tip.

If this would have happened to my work account though (that does have access to some more sensitive repos), it would have been more problematic if 'random' people got access due a typo in an email address. That's the reason I am am reporting it here as what I consider a bug.

[davevad93]

Hey @BartTK I see, well that's odd normally when pushing with the wrong noreply email with a missing a digit like you did, the commit ends up linked to a non-existent account with your same username, it also happened to me once:

So, as you rightly pointed out, your specific case does indeed look like a bug.

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[AyhemKouki]

The other user can't see your commits since it's a private repo. To fix the email on past commits, you’ll need to rewrite the commit history (using interactive rebase or git filter-branch) and then push with --force.