Click Here to See the Full Newsletter

Noticing another (the first being the gray text on white background) trend and it ain’t good. More and more newsletters require you to click a link for the full newsletter. To make the situation worse, some of these are in — ack! — Acrobat pdf format!
I like Acrobat files, but not for e-mail newsletters. E-mail newsletters generally load fast unless the issue has too many images that aren’t optimized (you won’t find me subscribed to those that do this every time). But to click the link to go to the PDF page takes longer.
I still read some newsletters that use this method because they offer high quality content and I respect the editor behind the newsletter. I just might not read every issue or refer back.
E-mail newsletters work for me because I can file them, search them, and read them whenever. Yes, you can file the “click link for newsletter” e-mail, but you can’t search it. You won’t remember if the content you need came from that newsletter or another.
Yes, trying to get an e-mail newsletter to display the way you want it in every e-mail client is an impossible task. But that’s not an excuse for chucking the idea and going PDF where the newsletter doesn’t have to deal with e-mail application idiosyncrasies.
Remember all of us have lots of information coming at us… and we all have our preferences how we like to get that information: RSS, e-mail, Web. A successful newsletter provides readers with choices in how to obtain the content.
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Am I off base here? Or do you like your PDFs?