I don't think it would be easy to write a global one for every site, but I think it would be cool to make a community-driven unsubscribe script collection.
While there would be some positive aspects of something like that, you'd either have to have it moderated strictly by a trusted moderator or make sure every user understood every line of all code they were executing from the site.
The potential for scripts that did very bad things is immense, especially given how easily you can massively obfuscate JavaScript code.
Does the settings page itself show all the options there set to "No Email"?
If any item is not showing "No Email", then there might be something wrong with the script/bookmarklet for you. If all the items show "No Email", then LinkedIn does not provide options to unsubscribe some emails.
I believe that's how LinkedIn works, but it's also the case even when attempting to permanently delete your account. I finally managed to successfully delete my LinkedIn account around 8 months ago, but then recently I accidentally followed a link to a LinkedIn page on my work machine, and apparently there was still a cookie around, so LinkedIn was kind enough to reactivate my account without warning. And oh how the spam did flow.
To be extra careful, I think you need to unsubscribe from all email, deactivate your account, delete all LinkedIn cookies from all your machines, and you might as well kill linkedin.com in your hosts files.
Might be faster to just sue. If it's spam then there's laws to stop that. Plus juicy cash incentive if you win, and they might settle to stop the wave that follows if you win.
I left linkedin a long time ago but I still get emails when someone wants to connect. I must have opted out of those a dozen times! Nope, still get 'em.
Also, pedant speaking here, "in one click" isn't really an accurate description of this process.
Actually since Gmail now has three tabs and the linkedin emails end up in the 'social' folder, it is less of a bother. Once in a while you go in and mass delete.
I hope Google shared this sort of information with LinkedIn. "Your daily emails are reliably considered spam, by people who actually want to use your services."
i wish they did have a feedback loop. i have a catch-all domain and an employee that was terminated with us left so now I get the barrage of emails to a general box for his LI account.
well he never updated his linkedin to a new email and you have to sign in to unsubscribe. well, i don't want to reset his password because i can see he still uses the LI and there is no way to stop these emails. seems like making it impossible to unsubscribe would violate CAN-SPAM.
DKIM is not a feedback loop. A feedback loop is when someone hits spam on one of your emails, the provider lets you know what message caused the user to hit spam. If you have a unique message id or something else in the email encoded in you can tell who it was and not send them any more emails.
I went into LinkedIn and deleted all my profile details. No more spam from recruiters, but also no 'ghost' profile I have no control over. Not perfect, but it'll do.
the first time i followed these steps, i got a "sorry, your preferences can't be saved because you need to verify one of your email addresses" – which honestly felt about right.
What about Google+ and Facebook? Although I would argue Google+ is the worse one since it automatically add you to every notification possible when you only want to sign up for a Mail Account.
Google also doesn't seem to have an option to turn off the notification that your phone has automatically backed up photos and video to your G+ account and are ready to be shared. I've trained gmail to consider it spam though.
It says something that LinkedIn has come to this. I've fiddled with the email settings on almost 10 separate occasions. Those controls do pretty much nothing though, either accidentally or intentionally.
The slimy interface that the slimy emails lead you to...
Edit: if you want some concrete things... I can never tell if I'm on my "public" profile page or my profile settings page, or how to get to which one. One of them shows my connections and one doesn't or something, but I for some reason finding them is hard every time. I can also never (on the first try) get to a message someone has sent me, because clicking on the message leads me to the persons profile? or similar. Also I don't want to use messages in the first place, I want email even if it doesn't get LinkedIn ad revenue. I don't need people to vouch for my skills at all, most of them don't even know what low-level skills I use on a daily basis. Leaving a group isn't easy. The grays used all over the interface are pure gray, and feel dull, instead they should have a small amount of blue in them. The stream page has a "People you may know" box twice. I'm not "interested" in any of their ads.
LinkedIn's problems stem from (1) a blatantly confusing interface or (2) a user-hostile, ad-focused monetization strategy.
I think LinkedIn is trying too hard to be more than what it is. It's the professional version of the town church. The town church used to record recording weddings, births and deaths. That's it. LinkedIn should be a record of hirings, leavings, new companies forming and old companies dissolving.
Against the background of that basic information, people should be able to solicit me, freely, to come work for them - but they should be prepared to wait for a response as I'm not going to check in with the 'town church' all that often (unless I'm between gigs or thinking about a new gig).
It might be nice to passively check in on past coworkers to see how their careers are progressing - but that's optional.
I think LinkedIn has a pretty bring future as a business/industry news aggregator which will ride on top of the social platform they've built. Think of it as a BusinessInsider/Forbes/VentureBeat/TechCrunch replacement.
Already you're seeing LinkedIn exclusive editorials by guest writers, and although most of the articles in LinkedIn's feed suck right now, I hope they increase the quality soon (e.g. No more "5 ways to be a successful leader" type articles).
If they can capture quality content and deliver it in the right way then I think that will be successful and fuel more growth in their product and revenues.
I've talked to Reid Hoffman about this, and his answer to what LinkedIn wants to grow up to be is something along the lines of "We've built this social platform which is successful + continues to grow, and that opens up a whole wealth of opportunities to build products/services around it [...]"
I think this is the right path for the company, but what's going to matter is execution. So far they haven't instilled confidence in their execution (What happened to their purchase of Pulse? Their aggregations haven't gotten any better....etc.)
You can unsubscribe from all LinkedIn email, but you'll still get email for any new category they invent later. So I keep having to do this every few months. For example: "endorsements" became a thing and suddenly I had to turn that pointless spam off too.
I expect they'll invent a new product which involves opting everyone in.
They also started sending me push notifications telling me that people that I follow started following other people. I have no idea why they think I'd want to know that. It took probably ten minutes with their app to figure out how to disable that.
That's funny. I found out that I ignore emails from most websites, except those from LinkedIn. I don't know why, but I click on all of them (and usually follow the link). No other website is able to bring me back with emails.
Maybe it's because I never go on LinkedIn otherwise. Maybe it's because all the emails they send me are paired with an action, maybe it's just an habit I gained. In any case, they work for me.
Shouldn't you be able to do this with a link in the footer of their emails? If I recall correctly, it's US law that companies (and websites in general) have to put unsubscribe links in their emails.
This is perfect. Nothing much else to say really. I am getting sick and tired of LinkedIn's spam and dodgy techniques when it comes to marketing. This should temporarily stop the spam until they decide to add more mail-out categories.
I cancelled my LinkedIn premium membership just before as well. As a premium user you still get spammed the same as a non-premium user and I can live without it. Vote with your wallet as they say. LinkedIn really need to re-valuate where they stand, you know a situation is desire when many people share a similar sentiment and you have to resort to using Javascript hacks to unsubscribe from email notifications, it shouldn't be this hard.
69 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadThe potential for scripts that did very bad things is immense, especially given how easily you can massively obfuscate JavaScript code.
$.each($(".down.arrow"), function(index, vote){ $(vote).click(); });
So the above could be written:
$(".down.arrow").click();
1. http://jsfiddle.net/k6FvQ/
1. https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API
Either way, it's probably a good guide to follow if nothing else -- I mean, reddit still has near-daily capacity issues.
If any item is not showing "No Email", then there might be something wrong with the script/bookmarklet for you. If all the items show "No Email", then LinkedIn does not provide options to unsubscribe some emails.
To be extra careful, I think you need to unsubscribe from all email, deactivate your account, delete all LinkedIn cookies from all your machines, and you might as well kill linkedin.com in your hosts files.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/linkedin-sued-hacki...
Also, pedant speaking here, "in one click" isn't really an accurate description of this process.
I imagine this is most useful for the bulk email sending services.
Thank you for calling me out.
well he never updated his linkedin to a new email and you have to sign in to unsubscribe. well, i don't want to reset his password because i can see he still uses the LI and there is no way to stop these emails. seems like making it impossible to unsubscribe would violate CAN-SPAM.
Though requires running your own mail server.
fortunately it worked the second time.
And really, the problem for me isn't stuff sent to my mail, but invitations sent to every mailinglist I'm a part of.
Edit: if you want some concrete things... I can never tell if I'm on my "public" profile page or my profile settings page, or how to get to which one. One of them shows my connections and one doesn't or something, but I for some reason finding them is hard every time. I can also never (on the first try) get to a message someone has sent me, because clicking on the message leads me to the persons profile? or similar. Also I don't want to use messages in the first place, I want email even if it doesn't get LinkedIn ad revenue. I don't need people to vouch for my skills at all, most of them don't even know what low-level skills I use on a daily basis. Leaving a group isn't easy. The grays used all over the interface are pure gray, and feel dull, instead they should have a small amount of blue in them. The stream page has a "People you may know" box twice. I'm not "interested" in any of their ads.
LinkedIn's problems stem from (1) a blatantly confusing interface or (2) a user-hostile, ad-focused monetization strategy.
Against the background of that basic information, people should be able to solicit me, freely, to come work for them - but they should be prepared to wait for a response as I'm not going to check in with the 'town church' all that often (unless I'm between gigs or thinking about a new gig).
It might be nice to passively check in on past coworkers to see how their careers are progressing - but that's optional.
Already you're seeing LinkedIn exclusive editorials by guest writers, and although most of the articles in LinkedIn's feed suck right now, I hope they increase the quality soon (e.g. No more "5 ways to be a successful leader" type articles).
If they can capture quality content and deliver it in the right way then I think that will be successful and fuel more growth in their product and revenues.
I've talked to Reid Hoffman about this, and his answer to what LinkedIn wants to grow up to be is something along the lines of "We've built this social platform which is successful + continues to grow, and that opens up a whole wealth of opportunities to build products/services around it [...]"
I think this is the right path for the company, but what's going to matter is execution. So far they haven't instilled confidence in their execution (What happened to their purchase of Pulse? Their aggregations haven't gotten any better....etc.)
I expect they'll invent a new product which involves opting everyone in.
Me: surely there's a way to just say "don't ever email me ever for any reason, not even for future newsletters you make up"
Them: Unfortunately that would mean adding you to our Do Not Contact list, however if you have an active acct we are not able to add u
Maybe it's because I never go on LinkedIn otherwise. Maybe it's because all the emails they send me are paired with an action, maybe it's just an habit I gained. In any case, they work for me.
I cancelled my LinkedIn premium membership just before as well. As a premium user you still get spammed the same as a non-premium user and I can live without it. Vote with your wallet as they say. LinkedIn really need to re-valuate where they stand, you know a situation is desire when many people share a similar sentiment and you have to resort to using Javascript hacks to unsubscribe from email notifications, it shouldn't be this hard.