[chirp_users] chirp_users Digest, Vol 53, Issue 42

[N4AOF]

This SPAM was partly the fault of the ignorant twit who invited the mail 
list address to Linked In, and largely the fault of Linked In itself.  A few 
years ago, Linked In used to be a serious professional networking site, but 
more recently it has become more of a MySpace wannabe.

When a person joins Linked In now, every time he logs in he will be pestered 
by a screen asking him to give linked in access to his email client program 
so that it can find people he knows on Linked In, but that come on is 
largely a lie.  What Linked In actually does is import every email address 
in the person's contacts and then it offers to "invite" those addresses to 
join his "professional network" -- it does not tell the person that most of 
those addresses are NOT already on Linked In, and it is formatted in such a 
way that most people never even see the addresses that they are about to 
"invite" - but by doing so, the person agrees to a set of conditions that 
allows Linked In to spam every address it found in his contacts.  Linked In 
will then spam those addresses, and about a month later it will spam all the 
addresses that haven't joined Linked In a second time.

Linked In claims that people can opt out of being spammed by their members, 
but you have to join Linked In before you can opt out.

Personally, on the mail lists that I manage, I treat Linked In invitations 
exactly the same way I treat Grouply invitations -- I immediately ban the 
individual from that mail list and from all the other mail lists that I 
manage.  Doing so may not be "fair" but it cuts way down on the problems of 
managing recurring spam caused by ignorant fools.


-----Original Message----- 
   1. Invitation to connect on LinkedIn (Tomas Mesta)
   2. Re: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn (Bear Albrecht)
   3. Re: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn (The Silver Fox)