How to Set Your Sales Navigator Primary Email (Company or Personal)

TL;DR

• Make a company address your primary email and keep a personal one as a second address. LinkedIn's help page (October 2026) recommends at least one of each so you can always get into the account.
• The change takes about 5 minutes and spends no LeadOcean records. Checking whether a prospect's address is work or personal takes one API call and spends 1 record.
• The primary email on your account is not the prospect's email. Sales Navigator shows a prospect's address only if they shared it. A data API fills the gap.

Prerequisites

• A LinkedIn account with Sales Navigator, and access to the company inbox you want to use.
• For the API step: a LeadOcean key from app.leadocean.io, exported as $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY. The free plan has no card and 1,000 records, one-off.
• curl and jq.

export LEADOCEAN_API_KEY="paste-your-key-here"

Step 1: Decide which address should be primary

Pick the company address. The primary email is where LinkedIn sends your notifications, and a seller's pipeline notifications belong in the inbox the team can see and the company controls.

A personal address as primary has one real cost. When you leave the company, your notifications and saved leads stay tied to an address the company does not own. Use the personal one as the second address. It is your way back in if the work mailbox is closed.

Step 2: Add the company address

Per LinkedIn's help page (October 2026), Sales Navigator uses the same email settings as your LinkedIn account. Open Me, then Settings & Privacy, then Sign in & security, then Email addresses under Account access.

Click Add email address, enter the company address and your LinkedIn password, and submit. LinkedIn may ask for a verification code sent to your current primary address first.

LinkedIn then emails the new address with a link. Open it. Until you confirm, the address cannot become primary: the help page says a primary email can only be replaced with a verified one.

Step 3: Make it primary and keep the old one

Back on the Email addresses page, click Make primary next to the confirmed company address. Do not remove the personal address. The help page says you can log in with the primary or any additional address.

A primary address can only be replaced with a verified one. To drop the old primary, make another confirmed address primary first, then remove it. Per the same page, you can hold several addresses on one account.

Step 4: Check what kind of address a prospect gave you

Now the other direction. When you copy a prospect's email from anywhere, ask whether it is a work or a personal address. Sending sales mail to a personal inbox is a different decision from sending to a company one.

The enrich endpoint takes one of linkedin_url, email, phone or person_id. Set reveal_email to true to get the addresses back.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "email": "jane.doe@gmail.com",
    "reveal_email": true
  }' | jq '.data.contact_data | {email_type, email_status, emails: .contact_emails}'

A found person costs 1 record and reveal_email adds nothing. A person we hold nothing for is a 404 and costs 0.

Step 5: Ask for the work address on purpose

If the only address you have is personal, ask for the company one. GET /v2/people/email/work takes the same inputs and returns one checked work address or null. GET /v2/people/email/personal does the reverse.

curl -s -G "https://api.leadocean.io/v2/people/email/work" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "linkedin_url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe-123abc/"

Both v2 contact calls cost 1 record per call, including a call that finds nothing. Use enrich when you want the full record. Use the v2 call when you want only the inbox.

Step 6: Read the status before you send

Whichever type you get, read email_status first. verified and catch_all_valid are safe to send. catch_all means the domain accepts everything, so the mailbox cannot be confirmed.

jq -r '.data.contact_data
  | select(.email_status == "verified" or .email_status == "catch_all_valid")
  | .contact_emails[] | select(.type == "work") | .email' lead.json

LeadOcean gives no refund or credit-back for bounced emails. This filter is the protection. For the full lookup flow, see how to find an email from Sales Navigator. To keep your own work and personal mail apart in Google Workspace, see organizing G Suite for personal and sales email.

Step 7: Size the prospects with a free count

Once your inbox is set, check how many reachable people sit behind a Sales Navigator search before you spend anything. Send count=true as a query parameter with limit 1. It costs 0 records and meta.total is capped at 100,000.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "jobLevel": ["VP"],
    "jobFunction": ["Sales & Business Development"],
    "country": ["US"],
    "limit": 1
  }' | jq '.meta | {total, countOnly}'

The same count runs in an agent through the free leadocean_count_leads MCP tool. A count with an email filter is not a mailable count, so label it by what you filtered. When the number looks right, POST /v1/exports writes the file: up to 50,000 rows a request and 500,000 a day.

Step 8: Keep a short record

Note down the primary and secondary addresses, the date you changed them and who owns each mailbox. When a seller leaves, the company then knows which address to close. Do the same for prospects: store the address, its type, its status and the lookup date in one row.

Rows age. The dataset is refreshed monthly, so a row older than a month deserves a second lookup before a send. Keep the misses too. A missing work address is a decision for a human: try the personal endpoint if your policy allows it, find another contact at the same company, or drop the lead. Do not guess a pattern address to fill the gap, because nobody has tested it.

If you run this across a team, the plan matters. Free allows 5 requests a second and 1 key. Solo at $97 a month covers one person at 50 a second. Agency at $497 a month covers a team with 5 keys and 200 requests a second. See pricing for the rest.

What you get

Response shape from the API reference (September 2026), with placeholder values. Contact points sit under data.contact_data.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "contact_data": {
      "has_email": true,
      "email_status": "verified",
      "email_type": "work",
      "contact_emails": [
        { "email": "jane.doe@acme.com", "type": "work", "status": "verified" },
        { "email": "jane.doe@gmail.com", "type": "personal", "status": "verified" }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Without reveal_email, contact_emails is absent. has_email still tells you whether a value exists. Your own account setup, the first half of this page, has no API response: it is a settings change.

Troubleshooting

FAQ