Breaking news email alerts for SMS relay?

July 8, 2005 12:10 AM

Does anyone know of an international news service that sends a short plain-text email, suitable for passing through an email2SMS gateway, only when there's a big breaking news story like the London bombings?

I'd like to receive timely notifcation of big events, but I don't want an ad-laden HTML message and I don't want a summary every day. I also don't want the latest Bennifer story to cost me 22c, or whatever it costs for me to receive an SMS these days. Does anyone have any suggestions?

posted by krisjohn to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

BBC email alerts are pretty concise, and aren't very frequent. Such as:

A German youth is given a suspended sentence for creating the Sasser worm which crippled computers worldwide.

For more details: http://www.bbcnews.com
------------------------------------------------
This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. You have received this BBC Breaking News Alert because you subscribed to it or, someone forwarded it to you. To unsubscribe (or subscribe if this message was forwarded to you) go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/email

Now I'm not sure if the mobile alerts I linked to at the beginning are shorter, I get the alerts to my email.
posted by ALongDecember at 6:44 AM on July 8, 2005

ABC News "Breaking News" sends mails that look like this:

Subject: Breaking News Thu., July 7, 2005
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 2:52:02 -0700

Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:

EXPLOSIONS REPORTED ACROSS LONDON


http://abcnews.go.com?CMP=EMC-1396

(and then a bunch of boilerplate to unsubscribe and such)

No ads. They don't come every day and they send them very quickly after stories break. Although they will sometimes send a lot in one day, as news continues to come out. For instance, there were 5 yesterday. I'm not sure any service can avoid that though.
posted by smackfu at 6:51 AM on July 8, 2005

I get mine through CNN. I was going to complain that they were overly US-centric (I don't really need to know about the Michael Jackson trial, for instance), but it looks like you can now customize them a bit.

And yep, no ads, all text, very informative, pretty short.
posted by occhiblu at 8:44 AM on July 8, 2005

Related question: are there any that would put the news in the subject? Only the subject gets forward to my mobile; I have to pay for the rest.
posted by grouse at 8:54 AM on July 8, 2005

I was going to post a question about this myself, after my AOL SMS alerts have given me news about Natalee Holloway in the last couple weeks, but nothing about the London bombings.
posted by stopgap at 8:07 PM on July 9, 2005