If the other member is not your 1st-level connection, you cannot send a free message unless the person has a Premium account.So we see that Chris is one of those Premium account holders who has set up his account to allow Basic level members to send him InMail. Take for example my attempt to send a message to Premium member 'Oscar.' If I click Send Oscar InMail on his profile, this appears: Even if there is a Premium logo, that doesn't mean free InMail is accepted. Non-premium members will never be able to accept InMail unless you pay, so clicking on the Send InMail button is a waste of time where there's no Premium logo on the person's profile. They do that by peppering you with offers to upgrade your account when you try to send InMail to a receiver who does not accept it.

Now LinkedIn naturally wants to increase participation in paid memberships, so it has made it to appear that to send InMail, one must always possess a paid account. Some Premium-level members enable an option called Open Profile Message, which allows Basic level members to send them InMail despite having no InMail credits. What I don't know is whether Premium-to-Premium account is free to the sender if the receiver has the option 'on.' (It could use the sender's credits, since they exist.) If the large action button reads Connect (not Message), he or she is not a 1st-degree connection to me. One such place I might see this person is on my Who's Viewed Your Profile page where the person's 'portrait card' appears. Let's say I locate a member with whom I'd like to have some discussion, but we are not 1st-degree connections. I believe that many Premium level members are equally in the dark about that feature.

I regret that when I had a trial Premium membership, I did not explore that feature because I did not know about it. Premium accounts contain an optional feature called Open Profile Message. Today we'll cover how a member with no InMail credits (having a Basic membership or a Premium with the monthly credits used up) can still send InMail messages to certain members. The receiving members need to have Premium memberships that are enabled to receive InMail messages at no charge to the senders. This is a follow-on to Not Connected? No Problem! In that post I discussed how to work around the limits of LinkedIn's messaging system called InMail.

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