Masking Email Addresses in SVN Commit Logs

Version control should track code, not personal data. Yet many Subversion (SVN) repositories expose developer emails in commit metadata, making logs a source of sensitive information. Masking email addresses in logs is not just cosmetic; it reduces the risk of spam harvesting, phishing, and privacy violations.

SVN stores commit author info in the svn:author property. By default, svn log shows the full email address in each entry. To mask these, you can preprocess log output or adjust hooks to rewrite metadata before it is stored.

One effective approach is to use server-side pre-revision hooks. In your repository’s hooks/pre-revprop-change script, intercept changes to author properties. Replace real emails with team handles or hashed identifiers. For example:

#!/bin/sh
# Masking email addresses in logs in SVN
REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
USER="$3"
PROPNAME="$4"
NEW VALUE="$5"

if [ "$PROPNAME"= "svn:author"]; then
 MASKED=$(echo "$5"| sed 's/\(.*\)@.*/\1@masked.local/')
 svn propset svn:author "$MASKED"-r "$REV"
fi
exit 0

For existing history, use svndumpfilter and svnadmin load workflows to rewrite author fields in dump files. This ensures masked addresses are in all past commit logs.

Client-side masking can work for read-only access. Pipe svn log into sed or awk to strip domains or replace entire addresses. Example:

svn log | sed 's/[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]\+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]\+\.[A-Za-z]\{2,4\}/[masked]/g'

Masking email addresses in SVN logs is essential if repositories are public or shared with external partners. It keeps focus on code changes, limits exposure, and aligns with compliance requirements. The sooner it’s done, the fewer entries will need rewriting later.

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