Clicking on the “Why these ads?” link shows this popup helper text: “These ads are based on emails from your mailbox. Visit Google’s Ads Preferences Manager to learn more, block specific advertisers, or opt out of personalized ads.”

I think generally these changes makes sense and am not too worried (yet!) – but will definitely be choosing to opt out of these “personal ads”.

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

First the background

I receive many emails on a regular basis like the one below from my contacts via both my Kabissa and gmail mailboxes, which I appreciate and follow up on to “link in” with my friends and contacts.

 However, I do not appreciate the dozens more that are sent to the Kabissa role mailboxes for volunteering, editors, community, info etc. These get alot more mail generally and are handled by numerous volunteers who might or might not be using LinkedIn personally already and not necessarily on behalf of Kabissa. We don’t have a policy for handling LinkedIn contact requests except to delete them unanswered.

I know Kabissa is not the only organization facing this issue, and of course LinkedIn is not the only networking site that helps its users send email to their email contacts. But LinkedIn doesn’t make it particularly easy to block spam or avoid the mistake of spamming your friends.

As you will see in my screenshot above, there is no link at the bottom to unsubscribe or opt out of LinkedIn mailings – is that even legal?

Tip for the annoyed LinkedIn spammee: Add Your Email to LinkedIn’s Do Not Contact List

I didn’t know this myself, but LinkedIn apparently has a Do Not Contact List. If you don’t ever want to hear from anybody via LinkedIn, you can request to have your email address added to the list by writing to cs@linkedin.com or by completing the form at https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask/path/dnca.

If this works for you let me know. (Source: LinkedIn Help Center)

Tip for the well-intentioned LinkedIn spammer: Withdraw invitations that have not been answered

I know you mean well and don’t intend to annoy your contacts with LinkedIn spam. The fact is, LinkedIn makes it really easy and fun to contact your friends via LinkedIn to join and connect with you, either individually by typing in an email address or through a mass action by connecting to your own email addressbook and inviting everyone you have ever corresponded with. This is great for quickly getting the benefits out of LinkedIn, but it is very annoying for those contacts of yours that haven’t heard from you in a while and may not even remember who you are or care to link in with you, or who don’t use LinkedIn.

You probably don’t know this, but to make matters worse, LinkedIn will continue to send follow up messages to the contacts that ignore your requests. The only way to stop this from happening (say if a friend emails you to complain) is to log into LinkedIn and delete the request. How to do this is not immediately apparent and the interface does not provide a way to mass withdraw all of your invitation requests – you have to delete each request individually. Here’s how to do it:

1. Click on “Inbox” (found in the top navigation bar of the home page).
2. Click on the “Trash” tab on the left side
3. Click on the subject line of the Invitation you wish to withdraw from the list of messages shown. This will allow you to see the Message detail.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Withdraw” button. If the option to withdraw is not present, then this Invitation cannot be withdrawn. (It may have already expired.)

No notification message will be sent to this member. You can create another Invitation to the member once three days have passed since your last Invitation.

You can also apparently contact LinkedIn customer service at http://help.linkedin.com/app/ask or cs@linkedin.com and ask them to withdraw all sent invitations.  (source: LinkedIn support forum)

Let me know if this works for you or if you have other insights. Thanks!

I just remembered that in October Amazee Labs announced that it would be shutting down the amazee.com social change platform on 23 December. I blogged about it back then and was quite appalled. I completely forgot to check on the 23rd, and doing a quick Internet search now pulls up no blog posts or anything at all about Amazee’s passing except my post and their rather terse announcement.

Either it is the timing of the shutdown when everyone was too distracted with the holidays to notice or Amazee really wasn’t a relevant platform anymore that anybody cared about anyway. Whatever the case, I am still sad to see another social change platform bite the dust and all that content and energy erased from view. I remain all the more committed to help ensure that social change platforms like Kabissa and WiserEarth continue to exist that are run by and for nonprofit organizations.

As I wrote back in October:

Civil society organizations running networking platforms must hang in there and not give in to the temptation to defer their important role to the Facebooks and Googles of this world.