To: abuse@linkedin.com
Subject: Spam invitations from LinkedIn - why no opt-out facility?

Dear LinkedIn,

I receive unsolicited emails increasingly regularly from your site, encouraging me to sign up to your service. There seems to be no way to opt out without first signing up to LinkedIn.

I have no LinkedIn account, nor am I interested in having one. When one of your users decides to invite me, I get repeated spam emails from you (example below [removed]) encouraging me to sign up. Why do you allow your users to do this, and why is there no facility for non-users to opt out of messages?

These unsolicited messages are sent directly to me and to various other company inboxes I administer. It shouldn't be up to me to set inbox rules to autodelete - LinkedIn shouldn't be sending the spam in the first place. Since you send out reminder emails, you're clearly keeping my addresses in a database against my consent.

You should only let people connect to others if they're already on LinkedIn, and allow people who aren't interested to click on a link and blacklist their address from receiving further invites. Or do you turn a blind eye to people sending spam via your service if it encourages people to sign up? If so, isn't that a violation of the CAN-SPAM act in the US?

Please add the following addresses to your Do Not Contact list:
[addresses removed]

From a quick Google search, it appears that your business practices are annoying other people too:

• http://my.opera.com/usability/blog/2009/04/21/how-hard-is-it-to-get-linkedout
• http://www.benbarden.com/linkedin-needs-to-let-us-opt-out-of-invitation-emails/
• http://www.computing.net/answers/security/linkedin-is-spamming-my-business-email/33503.html

Sort it out, please.

Joe
/cc spam@uce.gov