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Unsubscribe from all LinkedIn email in one click (gist.github.com)
190 points by chengyinliu on Oct 17, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 69 comments



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 confirmed this to me a few months ago https://twitter.com/ketralnis/status/364861501590339584

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


Twitter does this (automatically subscribes you to each new category of email) as well, and it infuriates me to no end.


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.


Please reveal what it is you did to disable those notifications.


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.


Just mark as spam, life's too short


Gmail's spam filter is so good that it even knows that I consider "LinkedIn Today" emails spam, but I still want to read the ones about my network.


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."


They do, when a user marks an email as spam gmail pings the sender back and notifies them.

I imagine this is most useful for the bulk email sending services.


gmail does not have a feedback loop


I think you are right, I thought I had read about the feature somewhere but now I cannot find any mention of it.

Thank you for calling me out.


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.


Gmail certainly does: it implements DKIM.


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.


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.


As someone who keeps their inbox clean and pristine, your post just made me shudder...


Even better, create a filter to mark all of them as spam automatically.


I have postfix reject anything from invitations@linkedin.com.

Though requires running your own mail server.


That's the first thing I've ever shared on LinkedIn.


I unsubscribed from all emails and still get them.


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.



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.


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.


Well for me linkedin was pointless and annoying so I deleted my account. No regrets. Happy. And still alive.


cool idea. Can this be done for many sites? like macros that take advantage of the site's own JS.


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.


Typically. For example, on reddit you can run this in console to downvote everything on a comment thread:

$.each($(".down.arrow"), function(index, vote){ $(vote).click(); });


This won't down vote everything. Votes get throttled, so I guess a setTimeout has to be used.


They also explicitly state that you are to make no more than 30 requests/minute[1], or restated, no more than once every 2 seconds.

1. https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/API


That's for the API. I don't think the official web site counts.


They also mention Greasemonkey scripts, which is functionally the same as running script from your console, so I believe it'd still apply.

Either way, it's probably a good guide to follow if nothing else -- I mean, reddit still has near-daily capacity issues.


Just curious, is there any reason you used `$.each` instead of `$(".down.arrow").each`?


Protip: you don't even need an each() at all[1].

So the above could be written:

$(".down.arrow").click();

1. http://jsfiddle.net/k6FvQ/


seems like the more functional-style way of doing it


Yeah, if there is jQuery or some other library available. Otherwise just fetch jQuery from the console and append it to the page, and do so.


Or, you know, don't use jQuery.


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.


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.


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.


I don't understand why everyone doesn't just mark all Linkedin email as spam. That's what I did eventually all email from Linkedin goes to spam. That's what to do with spam.


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.


You can't know what ghost profile they have on you.


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.


This is nice, LinkedIn are infuriating. My startup is in the email space and we have a very strong opinion against sending spam and providing genuine unsubscribes. Unsubscribing someone is easy, there's no excuse except that they don't want to. Keep adding them to spam as their ESP probably has a feedback loop and it could affect their sending reputation eventually.


LinkedIn is pretty bad. But why isn't there something better?


Besides the emails, what do you think could be improved?


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.)


Network Effects is a simple answer...but probably not complete.


Problem here is that I would have to log in.

And really, the problem for me isn't stuff sent to my mail, but invitations sent to every mailinglist I'm a part of.


Someone..please do one for Redbox. I am tired of getting spammed everytime I rent a movie.


Providing Redbox with your email address is optional, at least with the one I use. All they have on me is the info on my credit card magstripe.


Someone PLEASE do this for meetup



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.

fortunately it worked the second time.


Does anyone know of something like this for Facebook?


Thank you for your service to humanity.


Thanks! No more emails now!


Do this for Twitter please


Just did it! Thanks!


Just thank you.


lol linkedin's emails are annoying


next up: protecting your address book




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