Man, I hate LinkedIn. This is a perfect example of why.

Do people actually take their service seriously?

Yes, many contractors make very good use of Linkedin to speak with recruiters.

I hate how many pages turn the "invite your friends" feature from a convenient way to set up your new account into an obnoxious risk to accidentally spam all your contacts. LinkedIn definitely aren't the only ones to blame, you could even say that they are nice about it, since at least theuy don't scrape your iPhone contact list without you even noticing.

But there is one thing about LinkedIn's implementation that is just inexcusable: They send the emails in such a way that they get through to all mailing lists the "sender" of the message is subscribed to! So every week or so somebody else will accidentally invite the entire local cycling community or a nationwide robotics mailing list to become their contacts on LinkedIn. It's embarrassing to the "sender" and wastes the recipients time. Way to generate hate, LinkedIn!

(I know that identifying mailing lists can't be 100% accurate, but both of the examples have addresses matching @lists. And if you weren't sending the emails in the senders name in the first place, you wouldn't have this problem.)

This is great.

But even though I withdraw my invite, the invitation still sits in their inbox so when a month from now that person gets to it they get confused. My wish is that Linked in exposed the list that they are mailing. Do I really want the random guy from Craigslist joining my network. I'm surprised there isn't a larger outcry to their traps.

LinkedIn's customer service has a tool that will remove all of these for you and remove them from the recipient inboxes (on the service, obviously it can't remove the email copies) as well, should this happen to anyone else. It was mentioned in the aftermath of the Matt Haughey LinkedIn situation.

Could you please provide the link for the tool?

As I said, LinkedIn's CS has it. You submit a request to them and they use something on their end to zap away all the unaccepted invites.

Thanks for the clarification [redacted]!

I already sent the request about week ago. And they replied just today. Unfortunatelly too late. I think it was good thing don't waiting for them with my arms crossed. I probably avoided a lot of new unwanted connections.

The funniest thing is that they said I have still have 50 pending sent invitations that I did not withdraw. But Linkedin's sent invitations page says "There are no sent invitations.".

> Last week I fell into a Linkedin’s trap.

The best way to avoid future traps: http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63

Thanks, done!

FYI to other account-closers, you can download all your connections (the names, at least) by loading e.g. http://www.linkedin.com/profile/profile-v2-connections?id=YO...

I like the idea of a social network for professional contacts, but LinkedIn is just too slimy. I'll just link people to my own website & portfolio in the future.

Why did that require a loading screen and 'widgets'?

http://i.imgur.com/1eok5yj.png

But only the first time, after that it's bypassed (even after I clear cookies?). It says "Oracle" on the bottom right, maybe it's some product of theirs...

Edit: oh, every linkedin help center page says "Oracle" in the bottom right? I never understood this kind of branding... does it really help something?

Is there a way to opt out from receiving such emails, for those who are not on Linkdin to begin with?

You could probably set up a filter, but this is sort of like asking if you can ask the USPS to not deliver any mail from a particular individual.

lol, good analogy. So it seems we have come full circle removing distinction between offline and online world. The people can send unsolicited junk mail on the Internet as same as they do off-the-Internet. Extra work for USPS and extra work for citizens.

Sendgrid strikes again! (they send email for LinkedIn)

to be honest, don't you think this is more of an issue with how linkedin is using sendgrid instead of sendgrid itself?

Yes and no… Graymail IS the new spam. So when your company sends 800/million pieces of it day, you own that discussion.