Making use of your e-mail lists

An e-mail subscriber for The News & Observer's online service alerted us to this one. This person received an e-mail today from the Raleigh newspaper that was an advertisement... not a news update or a breaking news alert.

Many newspapers are doing newsroom generated e-mail alerts with varying degrees of success.

Could your newspaper take that same e-mail list and use it for sending advertising? My guess is that advertisers would love that capability as long as it didn't annoy the heck out of those receiving the messages. It might be worth limiting the number of e-mail advertisements sent each day and charge a real premium for the service.

Anyone else out there doing something similar?