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LinkedIn never passes up an opportunity to flood your inbox with emails. Even if you do your best to unsubscribe from every message you receive, the service always seems to find a way to send you even more of them. If you’d rather keep LinkedIn’s updates out of your inbox, it is possible—if difficult—unsubscribe from every single LinkedIn email, forever, without deleting your account.
Keep your email address under wraps on LinkedIn
This takes some effort, but it will pay off in the long run. First, log into your LinkedIn profile and check your registered email address on the email settings page. Make sure only one of your email addresses is listed here—otherwise you may get the same spam sent to multiple email addresses.
Next, check who can access your email address, which will help limit spam sent to you by LinkedIn members who you may not know. Go to LinkedIn’s email privacy settings page and click the drop-down menu below Who can see your email address. Select Only visible to me to hide your email from everyone, or choose a less restrictive setting (1st-party connections, for example). You should also flip the switch under Allow your connections to download your email in their data export? to No.
Stop receiving unnecessary LinkedIn updates
Screenshot: Pranay Parab
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Next, go to LinkedIn’s communication settings page. This is where you can nuke 90% of useless emails from LinkedIn. Click Email to open email preferences on LinkedIn.
Now click each of the options on this page one-by-one, and disable them all. Each section provides a one-click option to disable all emails. For example, if you click Conversations, you’ll spot an On button next to Conversations (in the top-right corner of the page). Click this button to change it to Off, and all conversations-related emails will be disabled. Follow the same step for all other sections—Enterprise Products, Jobs, Network, News, Profile, and Safety and Reporting.
Say no to newsletter invites and research studies
The above steps should eliminate most of LinkedIn’s spammy emails, but there are a couple more preferences that you should also consider disabling. Return to LinkedIn’s communication settings page and click Invitations from your network under the section labeled Who can reach you. Here, you can disable all three options (if you need invites to follow pages, companies, or events, you can keep those enabled). Definitely disable Allow your network to send you invitations to subscribe to newsletters? No one needs that.
On the same page, scroll down and click Research invites. Flip the switch here and make sure it turns grey and changes to No. This innocuous-looking option allows LinkedIn to send you emails asking you to participate in surveys for the company.
All of the above should keep your inbox free of LinkedIn messages—mostly. Some emails from the service, such as privacy policy updates, may still get through, but that’s a lot better than getting an update every time someone in your network changes jobs or posts a blog.
