Historical contributions not restored after moving verified email to another account

[nexradjosh]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Profile

Body

I transferred a verified email address from an old work GitHub account to my personal account (nexradjosh). The transfer itself appears to have succeeded:

• The historical commits now show nexradjosh as the author.
• The commits are on main.
• The repository is private and "Include private contributions" is enabled.
• New commits made after the transfer appear on my contribution graph normally.

The only issue is that contributions made before the email transfer were never backfilled into my contribution graph, even after waiting more than 72 hours.

Is there anything else I can do, or does this require GitHub to investigate the historical contribution index?

[muzamil-dev-313]

Hi there!
Since you have already verified your email, checked your branch (main), turned on private contributions, and waited over 72 hours, your configurations are completely correct. This means you are experiencing a known graph indexing lag where the server misses the historical link during the transfer. Before reaching out to support to manually rebuild your graph index, you can usually force GitHub's servers to completely refresh and backfill your historical data using this workaround:

The "Force-Reindex" Workaround

1. Go to your GitHub Account Settings > Emails.
2. Temporarily remove the newly transferred work email address from your account.
3. Wait about 5 to 10 minutes to let the servers register the change.
4. Add the email address back to your account and complete the verification link sent to your inbox.

** Why this works**: Completely removing and re-adding the verified email address triggers a fresh, aggressive re-indexing script on GitHub’s backend database. It forces the system to scan all historical commits across the entire platform for that specific email and map them to your username (nexradjosh).

If the Workaround Fails.
If your contribution graph still doesn't update after doing the remove/re-add steps, it means your account profile is stuck in a heavy database cache loop.
Because GitHub Community Discussions are peer-to-peer, community users cannot manually trigger a backend server rebuild for you. You will need to open a quick ticket on the GitHub Support Contact Page under the "Account & Profiles" category. Just let them know that you moved your email and need a "manual contribution graph rebuild"—an agent can run the server command to fix it in a few clicks!
Best of luck getting your historical green squares back! Let me know if the re-adding trick does the job for you!