Replying to LinkedIn Email is Hazardous to Your Relationships!
Posted by Steve Tylock on 28 Jun 2009 at 12:38 pm | Tagged as: About the Service
Someone sent you this terrific LinkedIn message – and you responded in great detail to this wonderful opportunity, but it’s gone nowhere – why?
Later on you met up with them in-person at a networking event and asked about it, but they denied ever seeing anything from you in response and moved on.
How frustrating is that!
The answer is all in the little details and how you tried to use the system – and I’ll show you…
Messages from LinkedIn
The beginning of the answer is noticing how LinkedIn sends you email.
Every so often you’ll get short messages from LinkedIn letting you know what’s been happening. The email subjects are something like “LinkedIn Messages” or “LinkedIn Network Updates“. The emails come from “LinkedIn Communication <communication@linkedin.com>” or “LinkedIn Updates <updates@linkedin.com>”.
This is all normal and you’d never expect an answer if you replied to those messages, right?
Messages from other individuals on LinkedIn
So what happens when a LinkedIn user sends you a message – either a request to connect, an InMail, or a group message?
It comes from:
“John Smith (LinkedIn Messages) <messages-noreply@linkedin.com>”.
Now that’s interesting isn’t it…
You’ve received it in your email system (because LinkedIn wanted you to know about it right away), and the name that you see is an individual’s name. But the address at the end – that’s nobody’s: messages-noreply@linkedin.com
If you happen to hit the “reply” button on your email client, you will compose a wonderful message – and send it into a black hole.
Let me repeat that for effect – if you reply to this note through email, your message will never be seen again.
How to respond
If you’d like to reply to that message, you MUST login to the LinkedIn site, view the message there, and use LinkedIn’s reply button.
Protecting everybody
You might say that this is an odd behavior, but it really is in line with the LinkedIn way – just because the system allows you to send messages to each other doesn’t mean that everyone has given permission to send their email address to everyone else.
If you want your email address known, you’ve got to include it in your message.
By the way…
You know you have complete control over the messages from LinkedIn, right? It’s there under the “Account & Settings” tab . If you’re getting messages and you want to change the frequency – do it there. And if you want your messages to go to another email account, you change it in there. (And follow the advice in this post to add email addresses to your LinkedIn account and set a new one as primary;-)
To your continued success,
steve
–
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
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Steve,
Thanks for publicizing this fact about LinkedIn. I had someone try to send me a message in that way…Fortunately, he had my phone number and followed up with a call when I never responded to his message (which I of course never got). There are several other “dropped” conversations that I am now left wondering about. (Did the person respond in their e-mail reader and send a message into a black hole or did they just not respond?)
I’ve communicated with the support folks at LinkedIn and they told me that one should receive a bounce notification when one sends to messages-noreply@linkedin.com . I told them that this is not happening and they agreed to forward this whole issue on to their engineers, although they didn’t seem to understand the urgency of a problem in a medium that is geared around networking where both parties are left believing that the other one had dropped the conversation!
Hopefully, they will fix this soon.
Joel,
It’s great that you had the patience to contact LinkedIn support;-)
I just sent a message over to messages-noreply@linkedin.com to check – it just heads out into neverland.
It would be better if they didn’t list the email as coming from an individual but said it was from “LinkedIn on behalf of John Smith”.
steve
Thanks for that useful, informative post
I responded to 3 messages this way last week and didn’t get a single bounce message.
I have to say it is shocking, as there is nothing in the body of the text to say not to reply directly. Further, there is no easily found statement of this fact to be found in the help pages either. It is only on close inspection that you see the “messages-noreply@linkedin.com” assigned to whoever you think you are replying to that might make you question what they do with your mail. Selecting “reply” in the email client results in an apparently valid “display name” for this duff email address which is not an acceptable “customer proposition”
There is no technical reason why an email to a general inbox cannot be routed to correct user so long as the display name was made unique by LinkedIn (some eService email software does this). This would be consistent with keeping peoples address anonymous.
No, this is really, really poor. If they introduce such user unfriendly features into the service I am not sure they understand their own medium. How many people who have mailed me like this think I am a rude??? so-and-so. I will be considering my future use of the platform
Coherers,
Glad I could bring it out into the light of day for you.
As in all things LinkedIn, they do what they do for what one hopes are “good” reasons.
In this case, by protecting users from inbound email, they honor their commitment to protect users from other users. (And I’m writing my next post about this)
The thing that is not-so-nice is that it appears that one could in fact reply to the email… If they changed the message to be from LinkedIn on behalf of So-and-So, they might keep the high “open” rate on the email, and clue the recipient in that replying won’t go back to the user.
steve