Yesterday I posted some tips to help deal with unwanted LinkedIn invitations. Today I received another invitation and, out of curiosity, followed the link anonymously in a chrome incognito window (control-click -> open link in incognito window). This allowed me see what LinkedIn shows someone who is not already a LinkedIn member.
I learned two important things: 1) Each LinkedIn invitation is treated by LinkedIn as an individual direct email to a LinkedIn user’s contact, and 2) despite this the messages are beautifully crafted by LinkedIn to guide the user towards one desired action – to signup/signin. No easily visible alternative (to say no thanks to a specific invitation or to opt out of all LinkedIn mail) is provided at any point through the process.
To say no thanks, hit reply and say no thanks directly to your contact. To opt out, write to cs@linkedin.com and ask to be added to their do not contact list.
Step 1: receive invitation email – there is not a hint at what to do with the invitation except to accept it.
At this point if you don’t want to accept it the easiest thing to do is to just delete the message. If you want to stop getting more invitations, you can create a filter to automatically delete LinkedIn invitations. You could also educate your contacts about how they are spamming you by hitting reply and sending them an email to explain that you do not want to join LinkedIn and they should stop sending you invitations.
Your contact then needs to manually log in to LinkedIn, find their invitation to you, and retract the invitation. I explained this cumbersome process yesterday which you can copy-paste into your email to your LinkedIn contact.
Note: The from address you see in your email (like in screenshot below) may be “member@linkedin.com” but the reply-to address is the direct personal email of the person who is inviting you. This is what technically makes it a personal email, not an unsolicited email from LinkedIn.
My friend Sabine invites to connect with me on LinkedIn
Step 2: if instead you click link to “view invitation from ..” you will be guided through signin/signup process, no opt out option available.
None of the links on the menu or in the footer provide you with any direct help to opting out of receiving these invitations from LinkedIn.
Clicking on the Privacy Policy leads to information that places the burden on your contacts using LinkedIn, not LinkedIn, to not spam you.
Here’s the relevant section – the key sentence is bolded.
Section 1, Paragraph C: Contacts Information
In order to connect with others on LinkedIn, you may use the Services to send invitations either to their LinkedIn profiles or email addresses of people you know if they have not registered with LinkedIn. The names and email addresses of people whom you invite will be used to send your invitations and reminders as well as to allow LinkedIn to help expand your network. Please note that when you send an invitation to connect to another User, that User will have access to your email address because it is displayed in the invitation. Your LinkedIn connections will also have access to your email address. You may not invite anyone you do not know and trust to connect with you.
You may also choose to manually enter or upload data about your contacts to the “Contacts” section of your account on LinkedIn. Information entered into Contacts is only viewable by you. By providing email addresses or other information of non-Users to LinkedIn, you represent that you have authority to do so. All information that you enter or upload about your contacts is covered by the User Agreement and this Privacy Policy and will enable us to provide customized services such as suggesting people to connect with on LinkedIn.
People you may know… is where LinkedIn tricks its users into emailing their contacts
I am still looking into this side of the problem and would welcome insights from others on where LinkedIn is facilitating the process of inviting people to LinkedIn. One place is the People you may know… section showing pictures and names. It is very easy to click on one and send an invitation. This will send them a direct email. What I am not clear on is whether these people are always already users of LinkedIn or not – and I suspect that sometimes they are not.
Clicking on this sends a direct email to your contact
[...] I wrote a blog post about how LinkedIn email notifications work, and as part of that pointed out that there is no easy way to unsubscribe from invitations. [...]
“Did you know? Technically, LinkedIn invites are personal email from your contacts, not LinkedIn spam”
That is completely incorrect. The fact that LinkedIn takes it upon themselves to “remind” you of unsolicited “invitations” that you’ve deliberately chosen to ignore makes it their spam. The fact that they invite their existing users to give LinkedIn access to their e-mail address book, and make it easy for said users to inadvertently agree to spamming all of that users’ e-mail contacts with LinkedIn “invitations” on their behalf without explicit consent makes it LinkedIn’s spam. The fact that there’s no “no thanks” button on each and every “invitation” makes it LinkedIn’s spam.
For the above reasons, LinkedIn is obliged to maintain a Global Suppression List of e-mail addresses that have indicate they require LinkedIn never to contact them again. You can add your e-mail address to that Suppression List here: https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask/path/dnca
Of course, LinkedIn would love for you to instead sign up with them to artificially boost their adoption figures. That’s why they don’t provide a link to the Suppression List that they’re legally obliged to maintain on the repeated unsolicited invites they spam you with, much less provide an “actually, no thanks, I don’t want to join your pyramid scheme” button.
Hi Rachel,
Thanks for your comment and input on this topic. I agree that LinkedIn is cutting it a bit fine and it feels like spam to me (like porn? I know it when I see it?) which is why I looked into it. At the end of the day the emails are actually coming from the user and not LinkedIn. Or maybe another way of thinking about it is that the users are using LinkedIn as an SMTP server to send mail. Try looking into the headers of an invitation you get sometime.
All of that said it occurs to me that I haven’t gotten one of these emails in a long time – and I am a LinkedIn user and regularly visit the site. I do not want to opt out completely from LinkedIn email. Meanwhile I have been seeing other kinds of interactions with LinkedIn that draw me back to the site and then while I am there I do find myself encouraged to respond to invitations from other LinkedIn users.
Maybe they are changing their approach to existing LinkedIn users. That really was ultimately what was bugging me – why am I being spammed to join a site that I am already using?
Why do they make it so hard to do anything but what they want me to do?
Cheers,
Tobias
I didn’t say that LinkedIn were “cutting it a bit fine”. I said that your observation that “LinkedIn invites are personal email from your contacts, not LinkedIn spam” was incorrect, and I stand by that statement.
LinkedIn users are not merely “using LinkedIn as an SMTP server to send mail” in the way that you suggest. When people use their email service’s SMTP server to send mail, by contrast, they do so when *they* choose to, and not when their SMTP service provider does. And if anyone that such SMTP users sends personal email to fails to respond in the way that their email service provider would prefer, an email provider’s SMTP server does not subsequently take it upon itself to harass their contacts by sending them further unsolicited ‘reminders’ of the fact that they have not responded.
LinkedIn, and other companies that use the “spam-a-friend” approach to artificially boosting their sign-up figures are playing a very dangerous game indeed, and they know it. As the following link below demonstrates, the law (as painfully slow as it has been to get up to speed with new technology) is at last catching up with such spammers in many jurisdictions. E.g. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/125938/#axzz2HQkudJCN
So please, you should not delude yourself that the way LinkedIn behaves is any more legal than it is ethical or wise. It’s only a matter of time before one of their users or the people their users are conned into exposing to spam decides that they’ve had enough damage done to their reputation by LinkedIn spamming that they are going to sue. Other companies that perpetuate “spam a friend” practices have discovered this reality to their cost. It’s only a matter of time before LinkedIn does too.