They are accessible over HTTP. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/commit/?id=115aeda...

They are more accessible here on HN, though, because crawlers that obey robots.txt will not see it on git.savannah.gnu.org but will see it here on HN.

I suspect that if a crawler is being used to farm email addresses for spamming, it's highly unlikely that robots.txt would be any deterrent whatsoever.

Spammers' crawlers use URLs obtained from search engines and public sources. If the whole directory is blocked in robots.txt, it WILL reduce crawling activity massively.

I did not know that about Savannah. I am mainly familiar with Github, Bitbucket and Launchpad. I guess there is no point hiding from the bots these days.

Why is everyone so uptight about their emails being public? If you're planning on doing free software development in public, your email is going to have to be publicly available anyway (otherwise people can't contact your for legitimate reasons). Spend the 15 minutes it takes to set up SpamAssassin and then get on with your life.

SpamAssassin is about as effective as wet scotch tape.

The existence of your e-mail address in public does not grant members of public permission to Republish or use however they please outside its intended purpose.

Community standards say this information is mangled before republishing to the web, Otherwise, if you post someone's e-mail address, you are aiding and abetting spammers.

At the very best, It is highly inconsiderate to republish, and in other cases, may result in legal actionw, as in suit for damages against the person who republished your e-mail address.

I mean, they're right there in the git log

Publish? It's public already.

Spammers are already using emails from git repositories, especially from Github.

For whom is spam actually a problem? Filters are absurdly good.

Depends on the email service. Colleagues of mine who work at military research lab have their emails filtered to junk in my email but then I routinely receive email notices in my inbox from university emails warning me my "Account is expired/full/overdue" and I must take immediate action by clicking on a link.

Hint: I think gmail filters are good. The rest? Not so much.

They are, if you can get them. Until recently my employer was using a mail provider that had seriously neglected their product. The spam filtering was atrocious, so I tried to avoid giving out my work email as much as possible.

(Thankfully we finally switched to another provider because the old one refused to support DKIM or even STARTTLS to other MX servers.)

It can be additional work for people self-hosting their mail. But I base that on my own experience many years out of date.