GitHub Email Hunter

Email scraping tools are not a novelty, but it's not often you find specialized scraping tools and, above all, totally free.

With an appropriate name, GitHub Email Hunter is an email scraping tool for finding the email addresses of any GitHub user and even some GitHub repositories.

First and foremost, you should know that GitHub Email Hunter is a Google Chrome extension. Here's how it works: you install the extension, go to any GitHub user page or any repository, click its icon, and wait a couple of seconds.

Once the email is displayed on the extension's compact GUI, you can either remember it, or you can paste it to your computer's clipboard using the adjacent button (the one on the right of the displayed email address).

Basically, if you can find someone's GitHub profile, this tool should work flawlessly in retrieving their email (even if you're not logged into your GitHub account).

The tool should work on pretty much any GitHub page because it uses an algorithm that detects all email addresses associated with GitHub repositories. The extension uses two methods to find the said emails: it uses the GitHub API, and it makes use of the Git clone and Git log.

In short, no illegal stuff is happening, the extension simply makes it easier to uncover what is already posted publicly on GitHub.

That's a valid question. In short, the extension was developed by a GitHub user who struggled to contact a certain developer he had a question for.

This is a great little tool for reaching out to developers or other open source maintainers.

While clearly not what one might call an all-purpose email scraper, this little niche tool can do wonders in those situations where you want to contact open-source maintainers on GitHub for educational purposes or future collaborations.