LinkedIn introduces, quickly says goodbye to email service that sparked security concerns

LinkedIn is shutting down Intro, its recently launched mobile service for connecting people over email, that raised security concerns.

LinkedIn launched Intro last October, as part of a larger push into becoming a "mobile first" company. The service was made for the iPhone, and was designed to grab LinkedIn profile information and insert it into emails received on phones. The service displayed that information to the recipient from the email's sender if the sender was also on LinkedIn.

Intro was meant to add more professional context to email and draw more users to LinkedIn. But it quickly sparked questions from security experts, who were concerned about the way the service routed emails through LinkedIn's servers. The security consulting firm Bishop Fox said that the service essentially amounted to a "man-in-the-middle attack," and that it was only a matter of time before someone used it to launch a phishing attack.