Spam catcher finds Suzanne’s book club too provocative
By BILL DUNCAN It is surprising how you think you know someone and learn from a complete stranger that maybe you don’t know that person at all. I have known and been a close friend and associate of Suzanne Beecher from Sarasota, Fla., for some 10 or more years. I met Suzanne through the Internet — well, sort of. This is not one of those lonely heart Web site meetings. I interviewed her via Internet to write a story about her unique business. Suzanne, like myself, is a bibliophile, one who is addicted to reading the printed word. She took her addiction a bit further than I have and opened a unique, one-of-a-kind business — an online book club that serves libraries and publishers. It was through my own library that I discovered Suzanne. After my online interview, she and I became close friends. For all those years, I have subscribed to her book club and each morning read with her from several of the genres she offers. She has readers from around the world. Her company is called DearReader.com, and via the magic of e-mail, she shares books with thousands of readers like me. I read with her every morning, that is until lately. For some reason that my Internet provider couldn’t explain, suddenly there was no Suzanne on my incoming messages. I complained and after jumping through a bunch of electronic hoops that I didn’t understand, I found Suzanne was magically there again each morning. That lasted for several weeks. Then once again, no Suzanne. Not having Suzanne to share that first cup of coffee with you in the morning is like waking up on the wrong side of the bed. I again complained. I was told it was Suzanne’s company’s fault. That proved to be not true. I was told it was my computer’s fault. That too was untrue. Mainly, I spent valuable time holding a telephone receiver to my ear listening to wild music while waiting for the next available technician who would attempt to make this computer illiterate feel even more lost in cyberspace. My theory is they don’t know either, but they can talk in tongues to make people from my generation feel they are divine. One techie finally looked in the Internet service’s spam can and found Suzanne among 259 messages the spam catcher had ruled as unacceptable mail for delivery to my computer. I have that reporter’s instinct to ask why, along with who, what, when and where. In this case, I would skip the “how” question because the answers I get from the computer people would need an English translation. What I did ask the techie was: Why didn’t the spam inspector catch that guy from Nigeria who just e-mailed me with an offer to receive thousands of dollars if I would act as his intermediary to get the money out of his country. His reply was that these Internet scammers are smarter than his spam filter. He said the spam software is designed to catch keywords in messages. Once he said that, a light came on in his electronic brain and he said he believed he had found the reason for the spam filter refusing to forward Suzanne’s book club e-mails. He danced all around his findings, using every qualifier he could think of, to say the problem was her name. She sends out her book club offerings from a site called www.DearReader.com. Many of the porn sites, the techie said, use girls’ names to entice males into opening them. So help me, Suzanne has never sent me an erotic book. Her only come-on is her sign off signature, Thanks for Reading with Me. And to my readers, thanks for reading with me. (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470. If you’d like to join Suzanne’s book club, check with your local library or go to www.DearReader.com and tell her I sent you.)
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