I've enjoyed Mercury's news bulletin, NEWSpot, in plain text e-mail format. The simple Web trick of linking items in a table of contents to anchors in the sections below made it easy to selectively view those things that interested me without needing to scroll through the entire message. Viewing two versions of the same message, side by side, I had to admit that the HTML message was far better than the plain text version. When I suggested that an e-mail attachment might be just as effective, Funk said most people wouldn't bother with the extra step of opening an attachment in a browser. I confessed that I probably wouldn't either.
Convenience has power.
Mercury mail messages consist of short abstracts of wire service stories from Reuters , PR Newswire , The Weather Channel , and other major news organizations and services. These are prepared by Mercury's editorial staff. The abstracts are linked to online copies of the stories themselves. Mercury's HTML mail can also contain small graphics or photographs. More importantly for Mercury, they contain advertising graphics and links to the advertisers' Web pages.