GitHub retires email notifications for repository pushes
The feature let anyone trigger an email to a repository's watchers without consent, so GitHub shut it off and points developers at Actions instead.
As of 15 October, GitHub no longer sends email notifications for repository push events. The feature is gone outright, not deprecated with a migration window.
GitHub says it shut the feature down to prevent spam and abuse: recipients never had to consent before receiving these emails, which made it possible to misuse GitHub’s own email infrastructure to send unwanted messages. The changelog entry gives no further detail on how widely it was being abused.
If you still want an email on every push, GitHub’s suggested replacement is a GitHub Actions workflow triggered on the push event, sending through your own SMTP server or email provider.
Why it matters: anyone who relied on push notification emails for lightweight alerting, a cheap CI heads-up, a way to keep a non-technical collaborator in the loop, loses that for free. The replacement works, but it moves the cost of sending the email, SMTP credentials, provider limits, workflow minutes, onto you.