Title: Old commits not showing up after I re-added my email — new commits work fine.

[saileshkhattar21]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

Body

Hi all, hoping someone can help or has seen this before.

Problem: My old commits are missing from my contribution graph on several repos, including private ones from my company. But this only happens to old commits — new commits show up fine. I think this is a "backfill" bug, not a settings problem on my end.

What happened, step by step:

My GitHub account (saileshkhattar21) used to have sailesh@drapcode.com as its email. I made many commits with this email — on my own repos and on private company repos.
I added a second email (sailestweets@gmail.com) and made it my primary email. sailesh@drapcode.com became secondary.
At some point, sailesh@drapcode.com got removed from my account. After that, all my old commits (made with that email) disappeared from my contribution graph. This part makes sense — GitHub only counts commits if the email is verified on your account.
I added sailesh@drapcode.com back and verified it again.
To test if this fixed things, I made a brand new commit using this email — and it showed up correctly on my graph. So the email is properly linked now.
But my old commits (from before I re-added the email) are still missing. This is happening across several repos, including private company repos. My pull requests still show up fine — only commits are missing.

Example: In this public repo — github.com/saileshkhattar/AI_Research_Assistant — 18 old commits from Feb 24 to Sep 15, 2026 are missing. They were all made with sailesh@drapcode.com on the main branch. A few example commit IDs: 352a571, b068c46, 8e89af5, c827b15, 9d6c491.

Things I already checked:

The email is verified on my account
The commits are on the main branch of each repo
The repos are not forks
I'm a collaborator or member on every repo where this is happening

My question: Since new commits are linking fine, is this a known bug where old commits don't get "backfilled" after an email change? Does it fix itself over time, or does someone from GitHub need to fix it manually? Has anyone solved this before?

Happy to share more commit IDs, screenshots, or repo names if that helps.

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[4Raisan]

Since a new commit using the restored address appears, the email is probably linked correctly now. For an older commit, check the author email recorded in the commit itself (for example with git show -s --format='%H %ae' ) and confirm that exact address is verified on the same account. Also verify that the commits are reachable from the repository's default branch and, for private repositories, that your account still has the required access and the organization allows private contributions to be shown.

If those conditions are satisfied, this looks like a contribution-index backfill issue rather than something you can fix by pushing another commit. Collect a few missing commit SHAs and repository URLs and contact GitHub Support, explaining that new commits work but historical commits do not. Avoid rewriting old commits unless you specifically need to change their recorded author email.

[saileshkhattar21]

I've already verified the author email, and the commits showed up correctly before, so an email mismatch can be ruled out. I've confirmed the commits are reachable from the default branch. This looks like a contribution index backfill issue on GitHub's end, but there doesn't seem to be any way to reach GitHub support about it.