new question about Linkedin

[ameliagrey]

sorry- tagged this on to the other post but thought better to start afresh.

I have been on Linkedin for some time- have nearly 100 connections- so have a rough idea how it works.

I recently received an email invitation to "Connect" with a man who is ,basically, an ex- ( not H but once a significant other)

I emailed him to ask if he had sent the invitation and he denied it- said that he had started to join LI, then tried to delete his profile, and now he was receiving emails from other people in the site ( presumably invitations to connect.)

I am a bit sceptical about this- how could LI send me an invite without him pressing a button!

whenever I have asked people to connect, I've had to be very specific about how we know each other and add their email address if we are not connected by business- and this ex and I are in totally different occupations so there would never be any cross over. he has no connections so far so it could not have come via a 3rd party connection.

My instinct is he contacted me via Linkedin as a means of getting back in touch- what do you think of his explanation? surely LI can't send invitations of its own accord unless you generate them?

When I first joined LinkedIn a couple of years ago, I used the 'find my contacts' thing (or whatever it was called). Basically it found everybody from my email account that was also registered on LI. I could very easily have pressed one button and invitations could have gone to all those people without me having checked through the whole list. Thankfully I twigged what it was going to do before I pressed anything which was good as there were people on the suggested contacts I would rather not be in contact with again! (Just goes to show how much my email account needs a tidy up ). I unchecked the ones I didn't want messages to go to but it was a long list and i could easily have missed one.

So, although your instincts may well be right and he might have come looking for you, it is also possible, or was, to send out 'connect' invites by accident, especially if you don't know what you are doing. I don't find LI particularly easy to use so I reckon it could be easy to make a mistake. The Ex could be telling the truth and has no idea what he has done or not. I don't suppose you will ever know for sure unless he tries to contact you again.

I agree with Bertha. He's clicked the 'use my email contacts' link and it's automatically done so without him being aware. It is still possible to do so if you aren't paying very close attention. In fact it still bugs me to do that on occasion, as does Facebook, BTW, when I log into my account.

So it may very well have been an accident.

That's what I thought- he is not dim by any means which made me wonder if he had done that, unintentionally.

As I have been signed up for years it was not possible for me to see what they offer you when you first register, but I did recall that you could invite people who were in your email address book- like FB.

If he has done as you both suggest then I know that his invitation will also have gone to some of his other ex's who are on LI- being a bit of a sleuth I have checked their connections and he doesn't appear to be on them since registering- so either they are ignoring him ( too) or his ivite was not as unintentional as he made out.

He has my email address obviously, but I thought he might be using LI as a "remote and impersonal" way of testing the water with me, so to speak.