There have been a lot of questions recently regarding the functional elements of adding new emails into your account and also how to set up or change the principal address where LinkedIn will send all of the correspondence and updates.
All of this information is controlled from your “Settings” which you can access by hovering over your name in the top right hand corner of the screen when you’re logged into LinkedIn. You then need to head to ‘Account’ tab in the bottom left hand corner and then to its right you’ll see a section labeled “Add or change email addresses”. [Old version settings page: the "Personal Information" section is in the right hand column and then in particular the "Email Addresses" section.]
There, you should see a list of one or more email addresses similar to the image below:
Adding new emails
Once on this page, if you then want to add a new email address then:
1. Click the ‘Add email address’ button.
2. Enter the new email address in the box at the top of the page
3. Click ‘Add Email Address’.
You will then be sent a confirmation message to the new email address and it will immediately appear in your list of emails as “unconfirmed”.
When that arrives, just:
4. Click on the link in the email message (or cut and paste it – you know the drill!) and you’ll be taken to the LinkedIn site
5. Click on the “Confirm” button that you’ll see on the page
6. You’ll be asked to sign into your account again at this point as a security measure – REMEMBER to use your current primary address to do so, not this new one
7. Your new email will now be saved
Changing your Primary Email
To change your primary email address – this is the one that receives all of your LinkedIn communications – return to the ‘Email Address’ page via the ‘Settings’ page.
Here you’ll see the list of your confirmed email addresses and all you need to do is select one of them and then click on the ‘Make Primary’ at the bottom of the page.
One last Comment
In a couple of places, LinkedIn does recommend that you have both a work email and a personal email associated with your account. This is actually good advice. In spite of best intentions, when you change job for whatever reason, your LinkedIn account is unlikely to be top of your todo list – however, if you only have your work email address in there and no longer have access to it, then you may have difficulties updating details etc. so do have at least two and that way you’ll not need to create new profiles and reconnect with people should things go astray!
As a final point, should you be in such a situation, you might also like to sporadically back up your LinkedIn connections just in case!
