What is the (or)deal with Linked.in?

The Web is a free element. You’re free (you’d hope) to do or to say whatever you want, as other people are free to choose to read what you say or not.

There is a limit, however. There’s a limit between what’s morally acceptable and what’s disrespectfully disgusting. And no, I’m not talking about snuff or disgusting pictures. I’m talking about the “Unsolicited Email”, the most elite branch of the commonly known Spam mail.

Spam are email messages that advertise or offer services that are not of our interest, they have never been asked for once, they fill up our mailboxes and that our mail filtering systems in some cases trap them before they arrive to our Inbox. In most of cases (should I say, in all cases), this offerings belong to non-legal businesses, robbery, phishing and scams.

The “Unsolicited Email” term is used normally to denote those messages that belong to well known sites, messages that have been received by a mistake, or in behalf of someone who knows our email address, and that eventually you can opt-out of those mailing lists.

A site that does it well: Sourceforge.net offers a link and a mail address to opt-out of their lists.

An example of Unsolicited Email, that’s unfortunately commonly received, is that kind of email that invites you to register to a Web site of a social network, like Facebook, Sonico, hi5, MySpace, among others, on behalf of a member of said social network. Normally, this email message contains a link where you can ask them to stop sending you messages, or some clear instructions on how to do the request, something like “visit this site and enter your email address to opt-out of our messages”.

Another site that does it well: Sonico offers you the chance to unsubscribe from their mail lists.

However, some sites do it wrong. I want to show you a rather particular case. LinkedIn, veering out from other sites’ trend, doesn’t offer any system to permit their non-users (an external person that doesn’t have an account on their site) to prevent their Inbox from their rather rude unsolicited mail messages.

This is the full (and I hope fully obfuscated) email that I received from LinkedIn reminding me of someone who had sent me an invite some days ago. It doesn't shows a link, not even a clue to what to do to opt-out of their mailings.

One of the questions that most LinkedIn non-users make themselves is how to get out of that circle of reminder messages about a LinkedIn user (in this case, a guy which I haven’t spoken with for years now) that had the great idea to allow LinkedIn to contact all people in their email address’ contact list.

Thanks to A Site About Nothing [http://asiteaboutnothing.net/blog/?p=66], I got the light that LinkedIn wasn’t so kind to give me: How to add yourself to their Not Contact List.

It is not easy, it’s a pretty tedious, long process, but at least it has been reported to work by a lot of people now.

To fix your problem with LinkedIn, go to this web address: https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask/subject/Add%20My%20Email%20To%20Do%20Not%20Contact%20List, and fill out the form with your personal data and the email address that you want LinkedIn to leave alone. In Issue Type you can select whichever you want, but it is very recommended that you use Privacy/Abuse (as sites in USA take privacy as something VERY serious, by law). Write a nice and tidy message in the Question box, asking them to add you to their Not Contact List. In example, here I paste the one I used. You can use it as you want, as I’m posting it in the Public Domain.

Hello,

First and foremost, I have NO desire to join or register for Linked.in. With that said, I find it rather disrespectful to get messages in behalf of other people, moreover reminders about those invitations that, I clarify, do NOT want to accept. Moreover, I can't understand why is it so difficult for you to add a "Do Not Contact Me Anymore" link in your mails instead of making us go through the ordeal of submitting a question.
In that light, I hope you can add this email address to your Do Not Contact list.

Thanks in advance.

I really hope that people in LinkedIn finally realize their mistake in not offering this link to opt-out of their mailing lists and that the other sites that doesn’t offer them start offering them now, if they don’t want to get a high Spam probability index in Spam filters. I agree with a lot of people: We should start to denounce those Unsolicited mails as Spam in our email service’s filter system. That’s one of the best ways for those legitimate enterprises to take action against this disgusting activity.

Last one: This is the whole email message I eventually get from TipsLinux. There's no link to opt-out, and in their web page there's no sign of how to unsubscribe. Badly done.

Update #1: The method to prevent LinkedIn messages detailed in this post works, even if it’s that tedious. Confirmed.