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

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

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 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.