A new trend: spammers crawl GitHub stars, extract personal data from profiles, and send spam emails. Recently, I get a lot of spam like this (or I am added to mailing lists I never subscribed to):

Other times, people just pretend like it's a personal message:

I get more than several emails a week "genuinely" asking me to give a feedback on some random paid product - which is dirty.

I liked that GitHub was a reliable platform for collaboration and personal interests. Unfortunately, from a nice place to socialize and one of the last places to communicate genuinely (unlike LinkedIn, which is primarily a spambot farm), it may turn into a personal data farm and spammer playground.

Why do we always have to destroy the nice things? I don't want to hide my email there; I want people to contact me with genuine communication.

What can you do?

• report GDPR violation: https://www.gmp-compliance.org/gmp-news/gdp-non-compliance-report-due-to-gdp-violations-concerning-rp-supplier-qualification-operations-and-trading
• report the business to GitHub
• report them to their email provider
• do not post the name of the business while doing so, do not give them exposure

Can we stop this at the roots? Please share this post if that happend to you, and please give us more ideas on how to stop this in the comments. We can still prevent this from spreading more.