At the moment, we don't have another way to do this. While conceptually and technically, it is possible to provide this, doing so opens a reasonable risk to our user's privacy. Using an API such as this would allow people with long lists of email addresses to quickly validate them and even attach user data to the email addresses. This is not a feature we will support.

This really needs to be done since email is typically the unique identifier that ties things together.Seem like you could allow it for accepted connections only.  Once someone has accepted you as a friend then you have full access to this information so why not allow a search or a way to retrieve email and phone number.THANKSiEnterprises, Inc.

Seems like this is a throttling issue, though I suppose by proxies and multiple API keys, this could happen on a massive scale.

I can imagine an email address is one of the most, if not the most, valuable asset. Though it's also the only unique identifier known at the client side. Isn't it possibly to match and search on email addresses using md5 or something like that?Grtz J

I also vote for getting an email based search for a number of reasons1) As unique identifyer, this would be the fastes way to get a result and alleviate a lot of search overhead on the LinkedIn side2) Non email based search not only cost overhead on the LinkedIn side but also UI and more overhead on the "application sideother"3) A user may restrict access to his/her data to those who have their email address4) It could be separate method where the only parameter is emailYou may consider something like this:http://api.linkedin.com/...........?email=datastring64 The datastring64 encoded string may contain “as@xeequa.com”That way you don't have emails traveling around the net.ThanksAxel

Lucian,Have you seen the RapLeaf API? It's able to connect the dots between a user's email address and a LinkedIn profile:http://www.rapleaf.com/apidoc/personDo you know how they've managed to pull this off?

Interesting find Aaron. Did you play with it?Another source we are playing with right now is FlowTown.com they do a pretty ok job getting stuff by matching email addresses.Axelhttp://xeesm.com/AxelS

It seems that rapportive is able to map email addresses to LinkedIn profiles.  How is this done?

We are using RapLeaf for now. It is moderately successful. The way they work is that they store presences and data in a big repository. But it isn't a real substitute for matching a LinkedIn profile against an email address.

Yup, rapportive is doing it. Any new info on this?

etacts (www.etacts.com ) is also doing this and its a tremendously valuable service. Any update on this ? Can we retrieve the user's info if we have his email address with the appropriate security for the call ? Seems like a silly limitation of the API

Interesting discussion...  a question for those looking for this functionality, playing devil's advocate; wouldn't allowing any kind of email tie-in with the API be in essence a Spammers dream? Off the top of my head, I could see a very simple script that is tied in with a dummy application and linked to dummy LinkedIn accounts that would generate random email addresses and fire them off to LinkedIn via the API as a way of verifying existance.  Spamers already use this scenario by sending random emails out with embedded images that 'call home' when opened, thus confirming the email address is valid.  Imagine hundreds or thousands of scripts running against the API until they hit their respective throttle limits, and with each email address they confirm they can then tie to real-world names, current jobs, etc...  such a list would be absolutely priceless.

@ 4406923 (not knowing what your name is)In theory that is true. But since you can eaily buy up to 100 Million validated email addresses (yes one hundred million) I'm not sure that the hack would be of any advantage to those kind of people.Option 1LinkedIn verifies who they give access to that featureOption 2Follow what Facebook is doing (as always) and we just have to wait 6 to 12 monthWe are using Facebook's open graph to do that today and works just very nice.All it does is to put facebook further into the driver seat.In regards to spam: Email is dead because of spam and LinkedIn protecting our email addresses is a drop of water into an active vulcano.My name is Axel by the way

Axel,How are you able to do this on Facebook? You can perform a search for a Facebook profile via an e-mail address?Sachin

@Sachin -absolutely. Not a problem. Using their open graph APIhttp://developers.facebook.com/docs/apiWhat it takes is to ask the respective user for permission.So if you create a Xeesm (our application) you can register with your facebook credentials.We check for email match to avoid duplicates and then create a full account with everything we can find.In our particular case, the user needs to agree to share his/her email address.Check it out http://xeesm.com/registerObviously once register we can now use it as single signon and as "sign on with Facebook"This is by the way the biggest problem with the new LI oAuth on JS API - no email no identification.It's almost useless unly good for some toy apps and games.What you CAN NOT do is just scan through their eco system - of course.

Hey, Alex, Paul here... not sure how I got a number for my account name, and I haven't found a way to change it!Good points for sure, and as I said, just playing devils advocate, but I think you are comparing apples and oranges when it comes to the Facebook and LinkedIn.LinkedIn is 'professional', and as such, many people are expecting that their personal information will be treated with a little more care than we've seen out of Facebook.  Facebook can get away with massive negative PR about privacy breaches, etc due to their sheer size and the nature of their user-base.  I would wager that LinkedIn would not fare so well from a user perspective if news broke that millions of email addresses + personal information was now essentially freely available.  And yes, of course there are email lists you can buy, but again, would you sign up for a service like LinkedIn if you knew that meant that your email + verifiable personal information was being provided into the wild?Big picture, yes I agree that releasing the 40+ million email addresses associated with LinkedIn user's into the wild is a drop in the Internet bucket, but from LinkedIn's perspective, losing the trust of their userbase could be pretty devestating/crippling.Option 1 would work, but would introduce other layers of administration and liability that simply might not be worth it from LinkedIn's perspective.And yes, I say all this as someone building stuff off of the API that could do much more with email addresses, but I don't see it ever happening.Paul

It will happen Paul trust me on that one.While many feel Linkedin is the "professional" network and Facebook isn't. Our ecosystem is only business users. And within that category it's primarily sales, marketing, product management etc. Last month the number of Facebook profiles exceeded the number of LinkedIn profiles for the first time.It will happen for a very simple reason:You can NOT seriously integrate LinkedIn into any other application as long as email is the no. 1 method to verify a user and LinkedIn is not providing this point of verification.

Interesting anecdotal info Axel, really!The integration we've done has primarily been with existing userbases, and we simply tie in their accounts with their LinkedIn ID on a one-to-one basis.  I can of course see where building an app purely off of LinkedIn with no pre-existing userbase or user infrastructure would be probematic with no email addresses.  Having a layered approach where the user can grant you secondary permissions to the email address would be a start.  Else, you could always simply ask the user directly for their email when they start to use the app and store that along with their LinkedIn ID...Paul

I concur with Axel. I think there are many legitimate uses for a lookup via email address; given that Facebook already allows this I am not sure what linkedin is protecting here - all this does is make the devs job harder for legitimate apps; by all means put in strong auth into such a call but unilaterally pulling this makes no sense whatever as a lot of the time an email address is the first identifier for a person

By the way, I tried leaving this as a comment on the Connections API page as well, but the current docs that suggest otherwise should be discounted. The email= search method is not active for any addresses, even the member's own; the id=12345 method suggest that numeric ids from the member-visible profile pages would work when they are actually alphanumeric per-application id that are discovered using the other api calls; and the url= method does not appear to be active as well, since the error messages require a /in/ or /pub/-style pathname but I haven't found one that would work so far. So that rules out a number of approaches that might help members discover or connect with other members just yet -- we'll all see how this evolves over time, of course.

Well one thing I'd like to add in all this privacy hush hush talk...........Just add the email id as a contact in your email id and LinkedIn will search all the contacts in your email id...........and Voila.........

Xobni also links to LinkedIn profiles specifically by email address. Again, how do they do this? Clearly this sort of search is do-able in spite of LinkedIn saying that it's not possible.

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