What are the consequences of changing the email linked to my ssh public key?

Question

I currently have one public/private pair of ssh keys that I mainly used for my college coursework. Since I linked my university email to the key upon creation, I would like to update it to my personal email for future projects.

As this similar post notes, the email is simply a comment used to identify the key and does not affect commit attributions.

If I modify my file directly in, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, how will this affect its appearance on sites like GitHub and GitLab? For example, here are my GitHub SSH settings with my old email.

Would I have to delete this key and reenter it in order for the email to update in the title? Or is the original email hardcoded into the key? Thanks.

Answer 1

If you're talking about the text to the right of the SSH key, then this is a comment. It's just a label for anybody reading the file, it doesn't do anything. You can change it to anything you'd like or delete it.