Seats and account safety
How a client connects their LinkedIn (and email) identity, how Handshake protects that account with warm-up and sending caps, and what pausing or terminating a seat actually does.
What it is
A seat is a single connected LinkedIn identity, optionally paired with an email inbox, that Handshake uses to send and receive outreach. Everything the platform sends goes out from a seat, under that person's real name. One client can have several seats, one per LinkedIn identity.
This page covers the whole life of a seat: Connecting it, the warm-up period it goes through before it can send at full volume, the daily and weekly sending caps that keep it safe, the health signals that tell you when something is wrong, and the pause / terminate controls that change whether it is sending and being billed.
Why it exists
LinkedIn watches how much one person does in a day and a week. Push too hard, too fast, and LinkedIn restricts the account - which can mean lost reach, a forced re-verification, or in the worst case a ban. That is the client's real professional identity at stake, so protecting it is the single most important job the platform does behind the scenes.
Without Handshake you would have to track every connection request and message by hand, ramp new accounts up slowly yourself, space sends out so they look human, and notice the moment a seat stops working. Handshake does all of that automatically. The seat controls also give you a clean way to stop sending (and stop billing) without throwing away the seat's history.
Who can see it
- Clients and seat users connect their own LinkedIn and email, and see their seat's status and health.
- Partners see and manage every seat belonging to their clients, including connecting, pausing and reconnecting them on a client's behalf.
- Admins see everything across all partners.
The sending caps and warm-up settings can be tuned at the seat, client, partner or platform level, but changing those defaults is an advanced action - most seats run on the safe platform defaults described below. See Settings and roles.
How it works
Connecting LinkedIn
LinkedIn is connected through a secure sign-in popup (Handshake uses a connection provider called Unipile to hold the session). You click Connect LinkedIn, sign in to LinkedIn in the popup, and Handshake stores the connection. Once it is linked the button changes to a LinkedIn Connected status with a Disconnect option.
After the popup closes, Handshake runs a short background setup to finish wiring the seat up. This usually completes within a minute or two; if it fails, the platform raises an internal alert and you can try connecting again.
Connecting email (optional)
If your campaigns include email steps, connect an inbox too. There are two buttons, Connect Google Mail and Connect Outlook, and you pick the one that matches your email. Email is connected through a provider called Nylas using the same kind of secure sign-in popup. Once linked, the seat can send follow-up emails and track replies alongside LinkedIn. Email is optional - a LinkedIn-only seat works fine.
Warm-up: Ramping a new seat safely
A brand-new seat does not start sending at full speed. It goes through a warm-up period so its activity grows gradually, the way a real person ramping up their networking would look, rather than spiking on day one.
A few things are worth knowing:
- Warm-up starts when the seat sends its first connection request, not when you connect it. The clock is anchored to that first send. A seat that has connected but never sent anything sits at the starting volume until it begins.
- Warm-up lasts about four weeks. Over that time the seat's allowed volume climbs in steps: It starts at roughly half of its full target for the first few days, rises to about 60% in the first week, around 75% by two weeks, about 90% by three weeks, and reaches 100% at four weeks.
- It happens automatically. You do not configure or trigger it. The platform recalculates each seat's current allowance once a day.
So when a new seat seems to be sending less than an older one, that is warm-up working as intended, not a fault.
Daily and weekly sending caps
On top of warm-up, every seat has hard caps on how much it can do, so it never crosses LinkedIn's tolerances even at full volume. The platform's safe defaults are roughly:
| Action | Default cap |
|---|---|
| Connection requests | about 20 a day on a standard seat, and about 100 a week |
| LinkedIn messages | about 35 a day |
| Emails | about 100 a day |
| Profile views | about 80 a day |
The day's connection-request ceiling depends on the LinkedIn plan the seat is on: A standard seat is held to about 20 a day, a Premium seat to about 25, and a Sales Navigator seat to about 40. The weekly limit of around 100 applies on top of whichever daily figure is in force. These are starting defaults. Sending also stops automatically outside normal working hours and is paced - actions are spread out with a gap of several seconds between them rather than fired in a burst - so the activity looks human. The weekly connection cap is the one people hit most often: A seat can be perfectly healthy and still pause connection sending because it has used its 100 for the week, then resume the next week.
If you ever wonder "why did sending stop?", the usual answers are: The seat is still in warm-up, it has hit a daily or weekly cap, it is outside working hours, or it has lost its connection (see health, below) - in that order of likelihood.
Account health and restriction signals
Handshake checks an account's health whenever it tries to send or sync, rather than constantly polling in the background. The connection it holds to LinkedIn can be in one of several states: connected, expired, disconnected, error, awaiting verification, or needs two-factor. When the connection looks broken, the platform does not jump to conclusions: It re-checks over a short grace window (about half an hour) and only marks the seat disconnected if the connection is genuinely dead. This avoids false alarms from a momentary blip.
When a seat goes down, the partner gets an email saying LinkedIn is disconnected and needs reconnecting to resume outreach, and the seat's Slack channel is notified. If the seat later comes back healthy on its own, Handshake notices and quietly reconnects it.
One special case: If only a premium feature like Sales Navigator has expired (not the whole login), Handshake keeps the seat running on standard LinkedIn limits and shows a reconnect prompt, rather than stopping everything.
Reconnecting a disconnected seat
If a seat is disconnected - usually because LinkedIn credentials expired or the login was revoked on LinkedIn's side - you reconnect it the same way you first connected it: Open the seat's status section and run the Connect LinkedIn sign-in again. Sending resumes once the connection is healthy.
The seat lifecycle: Active, paused, terminated
A seat is always in one of three states, and you move it between them from its status section. The buttons are labelled with the seat's name (for example "Pause Jane Smith").
- Active - the normal state. The seat sends and receives within its caps.
- Paused - a timed stop with a return date. No new connection requests or messages go out, replies still arrive, and contacts, conversations and campaigns are all kept exactly as they are. Billing stops while the seat is paused. A pause runs for one month by default and starts sending again on its own; you can also start it again early. The trade-off is real and the confirmation dialog says so: a month paused is a month of audience building you do not get back.
- Terminate / Delete - fully removing a seat and its data. This is the end of the line. There is a retention window before the data is finally removed, and the confirmation asks you to type the seat's name.
One thing to know about starting again: if the pause ran past the end of the period you had already paid for, resuming starts a new billing cycle and asks you to confirm the exact amount first. If the period you paid for still covers the seat, resuming costs nothing and happens straight away.
Limits and what to watch out for
- New seats ramp up over about four weeks and the clock only starts on the first connection sent. Lower early volume is warm-up, not a bug.
- The weekly connection cap (about 100) is the most common reason connection sending pauses. The seat resets at the start of the next week. Daily caps (around 20 connection requests, 35 LinkedIn messages, 100 emails) work the same way and reset daily.
- Sending only happens in working hours and is deliberately paced, so volume trickles out through the day rather than arriving all at once.
- Pausing disconnects LinkedIn, so starting again needs a reconnect. The seat's data, contacts and history are untouched, but you sign back in to LinkedIn before it can send.
- A seat can be paused once in any twelve months. That is deliberate: pause is a break, not a way to switch billing on and off month to month.
- Terminating is the deliberate, irreversible step and does not need a pause first.
- If a parent client or partner is paused, its seats are paused too, and you cannot resume a seat until the parent is resumed.
- A disconnected seat stops sending until someone reconnects it. Watch for the disconnection email and the seat's status. If LinkedIn itself restricts the account (a checkpoint or verification prompt), reconnecting through the normal sign-in usually clears it; the platform's caps and warm-up are designed to make that rare.
Best practices to keep an account safe
- Let warm-up run its course on a new seat - do not try to rush volume.
- Keep the platform's default caps unless you have a specific, informed reason to change them.
- Approve messages promptly so sending stays steady rather than bursting after a backlog (see Messaging and the Outreach Hub).
- If a seat disconnects, reconnect it quickly so it does not sit idle mid-campaign.
- Use pause for a real break - a holiday, a content review, waiting on new messaging - and remember it costs you a month of audience building, so it is not a free lever.