Does LinkedIn Send a Notice When Someone Has Ignored Your Invitation?

After you send an invitation to a prospective connection, she receives an initial emailed notification of your interest and reminders in emailed form for several weeks. These messages from LinkedIn attempt to renew her interest in connecting with you and include links to your profile, your prospect's inbox -- in which the invitation awaits her response -- and the preferences that govern whether or not a LinkedIn member receives these emailed notifications.

Unless you limit LinkedIn's ability to contact you via email, the acceptance of one of your connection invitations results in the service sending you an emailed notification that your personal network now includes a new member. Your prospect may have clicked on an emailed acceptance link or instigated the connection on the LinkedIn site. The notification you receive provides a link to your new connection's profile, her email address and a summary of her connections.

Rather than accept an invitation, the individual to whom you sent it may decide to reply to it through LinkedIn. A reply only results in an emailed update, but it doesn't constitute a rejection of your invitation. Your friend or colleague may decide to join your network at a later time, so long as you leave the invitation open.

Ignoring a connection invitation archives it without accepting or refusing it. LinkedIn's notifications don't cover this situation, so unless the individual contacts you outside the service, you won't receive any status update to indicate that your invitation fell by the wayside. Because your prospect ignored your invitation rather than declining it, you can send her a subsequent invitation as a follow-up attempt to add her to your network.

When someone designates your connection invitation as ignored, that choice makes an additional option available. "I Don't Know [your name]" constitutes declining an invitation and prevents you from sending any further overtures to that individual. If too many of the people you invite decline your invitations, LinkedIn may restrict your account. Because of these potential repercussions, the service recommends that members only use the "I Don't Know" option when they truly don't recognize the source of an invitation. As of January 2013, LinkedIn provides no means of assessing how many of your invitations were declined.

If you invite someone to connect and receive no reply, you may decide to withdraw the invitation. Although it will vanish from the recipient's inbox, she won't receive any emailed notification of your action. To send her a new invitation at a later date, you'll need to provide her email address, as LinkedIn no longer will allow you to contact her directly through the service. Withdrawals don't add more invitations to the total you can send.