Summary:

You can export information about all of your LinkedIn 1st level connections to a file.  LinkedIn doesn’t give you very much of the information that it has, but it will give you all of their email addresses.  Therefore, there is a way to send your connections a mass email.  However, please don’t be a spammer.

Details:

Here is how you export the information from all of your LinkedIn connections to a file:

• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• In the left navigation area, click the box to the right of the word Contacts to expand that area
• Now click Connections just below Contacts
• At the bottom on the left, click Export Connections
• Export to Microsoft Outlook (.CSV)
• Put in the text for the security image if requested (it only asks the first time during a session)
• Click Export

LinkedIn will create a CSV file, and the email address will be in the 6^th column.  However, for some annoying reason, LinkedIn does not put many of the other important fields into the file.  As of May 12, 2009, it only writes out the following values

• First name
• Last name
• Email Address
• Company
• Job title

even though it has a lot of the other information and could easily export it for you.

If you wanted to send a bulk email (mass email) to your connections, you could now

• extract all of the email addresses from the CSV file
• send them an email through the email program of your choice

Please be cool, and don’t spam them.

It’s a good idea to periodically do this as a backup just in case LinkedIn goes out of business, or decides to remove this functionality.  There are a LOT of limitations to this feature, and I will address them in a future blog post.

Good luck!