gitmailmap

gitmailmap - Map author/committer names and/or E-Mail addresses

$GIT_WORK_TREE/.mailmap

If the file .mailmap exists at the toplevel of the repository, or at the location pointed to by the mailmap.file or mailmap.blob configuration options (see git-config[1]), it is used to map author and committer names and email addresses to canonical real names and email addresses.

The # character begins a comment to the end of line, blank lines are ignored.

In the simple form, each line in the file consists of the canonical real name of an author, whitespace, and an email address used in the commit (enclosed by < and >) to map to the name. For example:

Proper Name <[email protected]>

The more complex forms are:

<[email protected]> <[email protected]>

which allows mailmap to replace only the email part of a commit, and:

Proper Name <[email protected]> <[email protected]>

which allows mailmap to replace both the name and the email of a commit matching the specified commit email address, and:

Proper Name <[email protected]> Commit Name <[email protected]>

which allows mailmap to replace both the name and the email of a commit matching both the specified commit name and email address.

Both E-Mails and names are matched case-insensitively. For example this would also match the Commit Name <[email protected]> above:

Proper Name <[email protected]> CoMmIt NaMe <[email protected]>

Git does not follow symbolic links when accessing a .mailmap file in the working tree. This keeps behavior consistent when the file is accessed from the index or a tree versus from the filesystem.

Your history contains commits by two authors, Jane and Joe, whose names appear in the repository under several forms:

Joe Developer <[email protected]>
Joe R. Developer <[email protected]>
Jane Doe <[email protected]>
Jane Doe <jane@laptop.(none)>
Jane D. <jane@desktop.(none)>

Now suppose that Joe wants his middle name initial used, and Jane prefers her family name fully spelled out. A .mailmap file to correct the names would look like:

Joe R. Developer <[email protected]>
Jane Doe <[email protected]>
Jane Doe <jane@desktop.(none)>

Note that there’s no need to map the name for <jane@laptop.(none)> to only correct the names. However, leaving the obviously broken <jane@laptop.(none)> and <jane@desktop.(none)> E-Mails as-is is usually not what you want. A .mailmap file which also corrects those is:

Joe R. Developer <[email protected]>
Jane Doe <[email protected]> <jane@laptop.(none)>
Jane Doe <[email protected]> <jane@desktop.(none)>

Finally, let’s say that Joe and Jane shared an E-Mail address, but not a name, e.g. by having these two commits in the history generated by a bug reporting system. I.e. names appearing in history as:

Joe <[email protected]>
Jane <[email protected]>

A full .mailmap file which also handles those cases (an addition of two lines to the above example) would be:

Joe R. Developer <[email protected]>
Jane Doe <[email protected]> <jane@laptop.(none)>
Jane Doe <[email protected]> <jane@desktop.(none)>
Joe R. Developer <[email protected]> Joe <[email protected]>
Jane Doe <[email protected]> Jane <[email protected]>

git-check-mailmap[1]