Manage your LinkedIn invitations: received, sent and declined

The Invitations section of your inbox shows who invited you and who you invited from Swimlane, and lets you answer invitations without opening LinkedIn.

Where to find it

Open Inbox. In the sidebar, the Invitations group has three pages: Sent, Received and Declined. A counter next to Sent and Received shows how many are waiting.

Received: accept or ignore

Received lists the LinkedIn connection requests waiting for your answer, newest first.

1. Open Inbox and click Received in the Invitations group.
2. On a row, click Accept or Ignore. Both buttons are disabled while Swimlane sends your answer to LinkedIn.
3. The invitation leaves the list.

Invitations are answered one row at a time: there is no bulk selection on this page.

What happens to the sender

• Every sender is saved as a contact as soon as Swimlane loads the invitation, before you answer. Whether you accept or ignore, the contact stays in your workspace.
• Accept accepts the invitation on LinkedIn, turns the contact into a 1st-degree connection and records the acceptance in their activity.
• Ignore ignores the invitation on LinkedIn and removes it from the page. No tag is added and the contact isn't otherwise changed.
• Your answer doesn't add the person to a list.

How fresh the list is

When you open the inbox, Swimlane shows the invitations it already knows and, if its copy is more than 4 hours old, fetches the current ones from LinkedIn in the background. After you accept or ignore an invitation, the next visit fetches a fresh list. Invitations you answered directly on LinkedIn, or that the sender withdrew, disappear at the next refresh.

Sent: invitations still pending

Sent lists the contacts you sent a connection request to from Swimlane, by hand or from a campaign, who haven't connected yet. Once LinkedIn shows them as connected, they leave the page. Archived contacts are not shown.

Invitations you send directly on LinkedIn don't appear here.

Declined

The Declined page is in the sidebar, but Swimlane doesn't collect declined invitations yet, so it stays empty.

Good to know

• Answering requires a connected LinkedIn account. If the session has expired, reconnect it first (see Reconnect LinkedIn when the session expires).
• New senders saved as contacts count towards Daily imports on the Lists page.
• Once accepted, a sender can be messaged from the inbox like any 1st-degree connection. To follow up with several of them in a structured way, tag them or add them to a pipeline, then work from that view.