Essentially you are pushing for a standard format for syndication (which atom/rss are, or have become in the blog-ish world). This is sensible, of course. I think that if, in the original case, the 'get this via email!' comes from the rss-syndication that's still in your ballpark of 'getting it' even though the magic behind the scenes to get rss -> email isn't visible to you, right?

Nice point though, I do agree that some standard format for syndication/publication of material is good... we push for this at work often and often get pushback from people :( oh well it is a phone company :(

-Chris