Stefan Beller wrote:

I may have missunderstood.

So today you cannot commit if you don't provide an email address
(usually the first time you try to commit, git asks to "git config
--global author.email=[off-list ref]"), if I remember correctly, so
there is definitely a valid (i.e. user approved) email address.

Not true.  But you do get a big wall of text when you make your
first commit without an EMAIL envvar or configured [user] section,
including

| You can suppress this message by setting them explicitly:
|
|     git config --global user.name "Your Name"
|     git config --global user.email you@example.com
|
| After doing this, you may fix the identity used for this commit with:
| 
|     git commit --amend --reset-author

Ciao,
Jonathan