Question: How to reverse transformations

If I say add:

transforms:
  email: "md5" # The email field will be MD5-hashed

How do I retrieve the actual email?

[pingu8007]

I’m not sure why Staticman bothers with 3., since there’s not really anything I can do with the hashed email address.

If you use Gravatar you can show visitor’s avatar with those hashed email. Gravatar use md5-hashed email as identifier.

[willymcallister]

I have the same question. MD5 hashing is specified in staticman.yml. The Staticman instance (mine is at Heroku) uses MD5 for two things.

1. Staticman receives the comment_form and concatenates three fields, separated by hyphens: username-repository (options[parent])-entryID (article URL). The result is hashed to produce a 32 text character name for the mailing list for that post. That name is sent to Mailgun with a request to create the mailing list.
2. The subscriber’s email is sent to Staticman instance as cleartext, included in the comment_form submission. Staticman sends the cleartext email address to Mailgun to become an entry in a mailing list in my secure account at MailGun.
3. Staticman does an MD5 hash of the email address and returns the result as part of the PR. It gets saved in _data/comments/post-name/comment-file.yml in my publicly-accessible repository at GitHub.

I’m not sure why Staticman bothers with 3., since there’s not really anything I can do with the hashed email address. It was perhaps envisioned as a future flexibility when first implemented. One thing you might do is answer the question, “Has this person ever emailed me before?” If you MD5 hash a newly arrived email address and its hash matches one you already have in your repository, then the answer is “yes”.

My notes on Staticman at Heroku: https://spinningnumbers.org/a/staticman-heroku.html