If you've received an unsolicited email that you think is from Liberty League International, please follow the steps below. Note that simply forwarding a message to us won't give us the required information to take action against the real spammer, so we will need you to spend about two minutes giving us the information we need to take action.

If the email you received is one of our newsletters or authorized mailings, it is because you are on one of our mailing lists. We use a double-opt-in proceedure for all of our lists, so unless you filled out a form and replied to an email, you shouldn't be getting email from us. You can fill out the Support Request form to confirm what list you're on and ask how you were placed on that list, or simply use the link at the bottom of the email you received to be removed from the relevant list.

If the email is not one of our newsletters, the first thing to do is to confirm that the email was in fact from Liberty League International. It is very easy for anyone to change the information in their email program to make a message look like it originated from us, so here are a few things to do...

Whether you are going to investigate the sender of the email or send us a complaint about it, you will need to look at the source of the spam message. Each mail program has a different method to do this, but the more common mechanisms are to click VIEW SOURCE or VIEW OPTIONS.

• If you are using Microsoft Outlook, then you'll need to double-click the email in question, then click on VIEW and OPTIONS in the new window that opened.
• If you are using Outlook Express, you'll need to right-click the message in the message list, and click PROPERTIES.
• If you are using Netscape Messenger, click on View, then HEADERS, and ALL.

You will then be presented with either the full message headers and content in the main viewer, or a small window that has a lot of text in it. Copy and paste all this new text into a new email. If you can't figure out how to view the source of an email in your program, you should probably look up the word 'headers' or 'source' in the help file for your program.

What you should have now is an email with the raw source for what was sent to you. If you want, you can just send this to compliance@libertyleague.com, and we'll take it from there. The actions that we take for spam complaints are as follows:

1. Determing if the spam was sent by someone involved with us
2. If it is someone involved with us, terminate their account
3. If not, determine where the email originated and contact the ISP in question
4. If the email can harm us (reputation or sales), then contact our legal counsel to determine if we should file a criminal complaint with the police and/or take legal action against the sending party

If you want to really make sure that the spam message was from us, then keep reading.

Now that you've copied and pasted the raw source into a new message, you'll want to look at all of the Received: lines. These lines will tell you what servers were used to pass the email from the sender to the recipient. The last Received: line will be the one that you want to focus on. On this line, there will be an IP address like 10.25.122.46, and possibly a name like mail.example.com - where example.com would be the originating domain name of the server that was used.

We at LibertyLeague use a few specific servers to send out our email. If the domain name (like example.com) isn't ours, then the message might not be from us, and could be an affiliate who is not paying attention to our acceptable use agreement, someone who just decided to use our name for their spams, or someone who is trying to make us look bad!

In this case, we still want to know about the spam, so please do send it to us, but you might also want to read our instructions on reporting spam to an internet service provider.