Email syncing gives you a more comprehensive view of your communication history with candidates by syncing active email conversations from up to one year prior to email authorization (or after February 6 2024 if originally authorized before Feb 5 2025), and cuts down on time switching between platforms. It is designed to elevate team collaboration by allowing you to share specific candidate conversations, which improves overall team visibility and transparency when making hiring decisions. This added context can increase hiring efficiency and result in more tailored outreach, which in turn improves the candidate experience.

Email syncing integration also offers the Email Connect feature, which enables you to send and schedule emails directly within LinkedIn Recruiter and offers additional enhancements to the user experience. Sending emails from within the Recruiter platform reduces the need to switch contexts between Recruiter and Microsoft Outlook or Google Workspace, and enables a more streamlined workflow.

Once your Azure or Google Workspace IT admin has integrated Recruiter and your Recruiter admin has selected a provider, you can go to Product settings > Account Settings  > Email & calendar > Authorize work email > Authorize.

If you’d like to turn off email syncing for your inbox only, you can go to Product settings > Account Settings > Email & calendar > Authorize work email > Deauthorize.

Once you have authorized the email integration, the feature associated with the permission will be turned on for your seat. You can deauthorize to revoke access from the application at any time.

For viewing email conversations with candidates, emails sent or received with candidates added to your contract will be displayed under the message tab on their profile or when hovering over “messages” in a candidate’s row when looking at your talent pipeline or running a search.

To send emails directly from LinkedIn Recruiter (Email Connect), click the  Message icon associated with a candidate’s profile and select Email in the Compose message pane. This feature allows you to compose and send messages conveniently within Recruiter, eliminating the need to switch between Recruiter and Microsoft Outlook or Google Workspace. The candidate’s profile must include an email address, but If an email address is not already listed, you can manually add it while composing the message. The email address will automatically be saved to the recipient’s profile in Recruiter.

Note: You must individually authorize the integration in your email and calendar settings.

While it may be possible to connect your personal email, we recommend using your company email, as your personal email may contain private conversations that you may not want to sync to Recruiter.

A full-fledged Google or Microsoft email account with an inbox and calendar is required. You cannot use an alias or an email address without an inbox or calendar. This allows us to integrate with the account and request for the appropriate access permissions to use email and calendar features.

If you do have a full-fledged shared email account, we recommend only one user integrate it with Recruiter and set the privacy settings for each synced email to be shared with the contract. Multiple users integrating the same email account on your contract may result in duplicate emails imported.

LinkedIn will not sync/ingest emails that meet any of the following conditions:

• More than two participants on the email thread: An email involving more than two participants (in to, cc, bcc) is not ingested.
• Recipient shares your authorized domain: An email exchanged within the same domain as your authorized email address is not ingested. For example, an email sent to or from @xyz.com if your authorized email is @xyz.com.
• Recipient is not in your recruitment pipeline: If the email involves a recipient who is not part of your active recruitment pipeline, and the email was not initiated through LinkedIn Recruiter, the email is not ingested.
• No matching LinkedIn profile for recipient: If the recipient's email address does not match any email associated with a LinkedIn profile, and the email was not initiated through LinkedIn Recruiter, the email is not ingested.
• Recipient's discovery setting restricts access: If the email recipient’s email discovery setting does not match the recruiter’s level of access, the email will not be ingested. For example, a recipient with the setting of "Anyone at LinkedIn" will be ingested, but if the "1st degree connection" setting is selected and the recipient and sender are not connected, the email will not be ingested.
• Emails older than one year or inactive threads: LinkedIn only syncs emails exchanged within one year prior to authorization, and only imports those emails if there has been activity on the thread in the last six months. Synced emails may be removed from Recruiter after six months of inactivity on the thread.
• Emails older than one year or inactive threads: LinkedIn only syncs emails exchanged within one year prior to authorization  (or after February 6 2024 if originally authorized before Feb 5 2025), and only imports those emails if there has been activity (i.e. emails sent or received)  on the thread in the last six months. Synced emails may be removed from Recruiter after six months of inactivity on the thread. Please note that once a thread is removed from Recruiter due to inactivity and then reactivated by sending or receiving an email, it will only sync new emails on that thread going forward.

If an expected email is not syncing and does not seem to fit these conditions, contact LinkedIn Support.

Email conversations will appear in the Messages tab in candidate profiles, and in your Outlook or Gmail sent items.

If an email satisfies the conditions for it to be synced, it should sync near real-time. However, if the email doesn’t appear instantly, we recommend waiting at least 20 minutes before troubleshooting. Some common scenarios can be found in this article.

When you first enable email syncing, Recruiter will automatically fetch relevant one-on-one emails from up to one year prior to your authorization  (or after February 6 2024 if originally authorized before Feb 5 2025). Inactive threads may be deleted from Recruiter after six months of inactivity (i.e. no emails have been sent or received), though they remain safe in your original inbox. Please note that once a thread is removed from Recruiter due to inactivity and then reactivated by sending or receiving an email, it will only sync new emails on that thread going forward.

Yes, LinkedIn now incorporates active sync deletion into the platform, ensuring that when you delete an email in your email client, it is also automatically removed from LinkedIn Recruiter as long as your authorization is active. This feature maintains data consistency and integrity across platforms and has been developed with extensive effort to ensure compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). As part of DMA compliance, when a contract becomes inactive (suspended), LinkedIn automatically deletes all third-party data, including data from Outlook or Google. This applies to both email and calendar features.

If a thread remains inactive (i.e. no emails sent or received) for six months, the associated emails may be automatically removed from Recruiter. Please note that once a thread is removed from Recruiter due to inactivity and then reactivated by sending or receiving an email, it will only sync new emails on that thread going forward. If you delete a synced email from your email inbox after deauthorizing,, it will not be removed from your Recruiter messages until 6 months of inactivity have passed.

At this time, we only sync emails from email addresses that are associated with a member’s LinkedIn profile and have their profile discovery setting by email set to “Anyone on Linkedin” turned on. In addition, we ignore any emails that use the same domain as the email you authorized with (e.g., if your email domain was @xyz.com, then and emails to/from an email address using the @xyz.com domain would not be synced). See Which of my emails will be synced to Recruiter? FAQ above for more information.

Once an email conversation with a candidate begins syncing, Recruiter will continue to sync all new one-to-one messages in that thread, regardless if the message recipient changes (e.g., if you reply but replace the recipient or add a new one). 

Here are a few options:

• Ensure that the email address that the candidate is using to communicate with you is the same email address associated with the candidate’s LinkedIn profile.
• Check to see that the candidate email address does not have the same domain as the email address you authorized with, as we do not sync emails to/from email addresses with the same domain. 
• Confirm that the timeline and size limitations are not affecting your emails:
  • We only ingest emails from up to one year before your authorized syncing  (or after February 6 2024 if originally authorized before Feb 5 2025).
  • Emails on threads that have been inactive (i.e. no emails sent or received)  for six months may be removed from Recruiter. Please note that once a thread is removed from Recruiter due to inactivity and then reactivated by sending or receiving an email, it will only sync new emails on that thread going forward.
  • Email bodies larger than 500KB (excluding attachments) won’t be fully stored in Recruiter.
• Check if there was a long gap between deauthorizing and reauthorizing. If more than six months passed between deauthorization and reauthorization, a new sync period would begin, possibly causing gaps in older email threads.
• Try reauthenticating by navigating to Product settings > Account Settings > Email & calendar > Authorize work email, deauthorizing, and then reauthorizing. Ensure that during authorization, you are checking all consent boxes.
• Confirm with your IT Admin (Google Workspace or Azure admin) and Recruiter admin that no changes were made to the integration permissions or settings on their end. 

If all of the above fails, contact LinkedIn Support.

All previously synced emails remain in LinkedIn Recruiter even after you deauthorize. However, no new or previously un-synced emails will be fetched until you reauthorize your inbox. If you reauthorize your inbox within six months, syncing resumes from where it left off; if more than six months have passed, a new historical sync will begin. Keep in mind that deauthorizing does not delete any previously synced emails from Recruiter or your original inbox, but any threads that remain inactive for six months may be removed from Recruiter to keep your view streamlined and up to date.

Once an email is matched and stored, the visibility of the email in Recruiter is automatically set to Private to me. The owner of the email can determine whether they want to keep the email private or change its visibility to their organization.

Note: The admin “Inmail Default Visibility” setting has no impact on this. Even if default visibility is set to visible to everyone in the project or organization, synced emails will continue to be private until the user decides to change the visibility of each synced email.

The visibility of your InMail communications is dependent on the InMail Default Visibility setting available to admins and the visibility of the specific message. See Update your InMail default visibility for more information.

• If you see a message regarding admin approval, your organization may not have granted the correct access to our application for you to use this feature. Please share the following information with your IT administrator or systems administrator to grant this access. Refer to the guides below for more information:
  • Google Workspace email and calendar integration guide 
  • Microsoft 365 email and calendar integration guide
• If you see a message stating that you are not assigned access to the application by your admin, your organization may have granted access to specific users but not to you. Ask your administrator to add you to the list of people who are allowed to access this application. 
• The email address you are trying to authorize may not have a mailbox or calendar associated with it (e.g., xyz@gmail.com may only have a Google Drive associated with it and your company uses xyz@outlook.com for email and calendar purposes, or you attempted to use an alias or team/shared inbox). Ask your Recruiter admin to ensure that the email and calendar provider selected for the contract is the provider you use for email and calendar services. In addition, ensure that you are not using an alias or an email address without an inbox or calendar. 
• The email address you are trying to authorize may not match the provider that was selected by your Recruiter admin. Ask your LinkedIn Recruiter administrator to change the email and calendar provider for the contract to the provider you use for email and calendar services.
• The email address you are trying to authorize may be hosted on-premise rather than online/on your email provider’s cloud. Ask your administrator to migrate the email address so it is hosted online/on the provider’s cloud.
• The email address you are trying to authorize may not be hosted by Google or Microsoft. Gmail and Outlook are the only email providers currently supported.
• Your organization’s firewall may be configured to prevent network requests needed by the oAuth flow with your email provider. Ask your administrator to enable network requests for oAuth with your email provider.
  

You can send initial or follow-up messages through this email integration if the candidate’s profile includes an email address. If an email address is not already listed, you can manually add it while composing the message. The email address will automatically be saved to the recipient’s profile in Recruiter, enabling you to send messages to the recipient via email through Recruiter.