UPDATED – 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 (which LinkedIn calls your Primary email address) where LinkedIn will send all of the correspondence and updates. It is also the email address that appears in your Contact Info area, so it has a double importance.
All of this information is controlled from your “Settings & Privacy” page which you can access by hovering over ‘Me’ in the main menu (top right hand corner of the screen when you’re logged into LinkedIn) and then choosing it from the menu below.
You then need to head to the ‘Sign In & Security’ menu item on the left hand side of the page – this gives you the ‘Account Access’ area and the top item should be ‘Email addresses’.
Clicking on this will show you the list of all of the email addresses you have associated with your LinkedIn account – this might be one or more email addresses, and should look similar to the image below:
Adding new emails
Once on this page, if you then want to add a new email address then:
1. Go to the bottom of your list and click the ‘Add email address’ link.
2. Enter the new email address in the box that appears
3. Click ‘Send Verification’. You will usually also be asked for your LinkedIn password.
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 & Privacy’ 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’ to the right hand side of it and then add your Password again. You can never be too sure!
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!
When you have verified an email address (which you’d need to do to make it useful) then you can use this as your log-in address as well – it uses the same password as previously, but does give you an additional access method. As I said earlier, you don’t want to be locked out of your account!
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!
