This article is for all those people who don’t want to use LinkedIn.
Now my core readers are probably wondering “What the heck is Steve thinking?” But if you trust me and read on, I bet you’ll still get something out of this thread…
Hot topic
First – I have never gotten so much attention out of an article concept, but I’ll just have to make lemonade out of this situation.
To see for yourself, search on “unwelcome” in the ‘Search the Site’ widget in the right column. Yes, in case you didn’t realize, you can search through all of my old articles for any topic that you’re interested in. Unwelcome will get you this entire series of articles.
The comment
Valerie writes: I am getting SO frustrated at all the LinkedIn requests sent to my work email. I’m not a LI member and DON’T WANT TO BE, and there’s no way to tell LinkedIn that I don’t know and don’t want to know the people who are sending me these requests. It’s bordering on harassment, as when I delete the emails, I just get five more later reminding me that I haven’t replied. HELP!
And while I might want to make the case that as a working professional, she could or should be on LinkedIn, I know that it just isn’t attractive for some people.
And there should be nothing wrong with opting out. (And in my own way, I make the same decision about Facebook – I just don’t have much desire to participate…)
If she joined
Only because it could be one solution, I have to mention this part.
If she joined, she could register both her personal and work emails, and keep the personal as primary. Then all the LinkedIn notices and announcements and invitations would go to the personal account – even when people identify her by the work email address.
Next – if people that she doesn’t know invited her to connect, she could use the “I don’t know you” button and exact some revenge on them for bothering her.
But without a LinkedIn account, she can’t do either of these things.
Email is sortable
I don’t care which email tool you use – you can probably sort your email. The email client is just following “rules”, and all you have to do is create a new rule.
Program the client so that whenever email is received from an address that contains the characters “linkedin.com”, just delete it. (Or send it to a special “LinkedIn email” folder…)
Saving your sanity
And that’s all you have to do, no more annoying notes.
(And for those that want to get and manage LinkedIn email, just create a new folder and drop all of those messages into it – wasn’t that easy?)
Now I can’t tell you how to do that with your specific email client, but I bet your IT support group could help you with that. Submit a trouble ticket that says: ‘I want to create a filter for email from anyone with the string “linkedin.com” in the “From” field that just dumps it in the trash. Please help me do this.‘ (Feel free to copy and paste this text right into your organizational help desk ticket submission window;-)
And I bet they will.
A better way?
Is there anything else about email from LinkedIn that we ought to cover? Apparently it’s all the rage;-)
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
You can ask LinkedIn to add your email to their “do not contact” list and they will stop sending you email. You can do this via the link below (it was hard to find)
https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask/path/dnca
In my view, the way LinkedIn harasses people by sending them invites and a billion reminders is incredibly bad business practice and I would never join a community that does that.
Dzeni,
Thanks for that link – I believe that sort of option may not have even been available when I wrote the article in May of last year.
For others that find this article, you can read the help entry that points to the “contact us” form here:
https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426
steve
Thank you for the suggestion to use an e-mail client rule to filter unwanted LinkedIn E-mail.
My situation is this: I have a business address connected to my LinkedIn account, and a personal address which is not, and which I do not want to connect to LinkedIn. So what happens is people allow LinkedIn into their contacts, willingly or not, and I get a constant stream of connection invitations to my personal e-mail. LinkedIn does not allow me to deal with them except by signing in with that e-mail. I think that is not only rude, but harassment. Nonetheless, I have use for the business account with them, so I keep it. Now I have set up a filter, and will not hear from them on my personal account again.
I posted a similar comment in another thread, but I guess the thread was too old so my comment was ignored:
I’ve read several articles here regarding people who want to stop receiving unsolicited/unwanted email from LinkedIn. In most cases, these people seem to be current or former members.
What about the rest of us, people like Valerie above, and myself? The people who aren’t on social media? The ones who refuse to publish personal details on LinkedIn or any other site and have no reason to ever have received contact from them before.
Recent emails have included my name at the bottom. If, as other threads have indicated, this information is coming from cell phone contact lists compromised by the LinkedIn app, then LinkedIn now has my phone number, and whatever other personal details the people had populated their contact list with. LinkedIn (just like Google/Gmail and all the other dataminers) are building ersatz social networks off the contact lists of people I have dealt with in the past in manners ranging from superficial to detailed. I don’t appreciate this.
What can be done to prevent LinkedIn from contacting us and saying “Hey there! This friend/associate/random person you did business with years ago, who gave us access to their contact list has “asked” us to have you join their professional circle – click here to verify that you know them”.
I don’t want to “click there”. I shouldn’t need to set a rule, or send it to my email provider as spam. I don’t want to have to block it. I certainly don’t think I should need to click “unsubscribe” at the bottom, because I didn’t subscribe in the first place. Any reputable business considers all communication “opt-in”, not “opt-out”. There is no place I can find on the LinkedIn site for a non-member to stop receiving emails from them. I had to contact them via email just to get someone to admit they had a DNC link. However, that link took me to a page that required me to join so I could then click a link to stop the communications. So LinkedIn is a little unclear on the concept…
So how the heck do I stop being “linked” to people who should not have given my contact info out, and how do I get LinkedIn to delete my information? Simply putting me on a “DNC” list doesn’t mean they’re going to stop compiling information on me. The customer care rep I finally found at LinkedIn told me that adding me to DNC just means they’ll hold off on contacting me via that email but I can join later. That means they’re going to keep whatever info they glean about me from their customers’ contact lists.
Where is the big red button that says “click here and we will deny you ever existed”?
Sure Ellis, I’ll bite.
I know of no such feature.
Good luck with that.
steve
Good luck with what?