The Daily Dish is a free email newsletter companion to The South Beach Diet Online. Both are published by Waterfront Media (formerly Agora Media), parent of a number of other health email newsletters, including Morning Stretch with Denise Austin, Emotional Health and Managing Diabetes.

The Daily Dish promises to help readers “stay on track with daily tips and recipes from The South Beach Diet.” The acquisition strategy, or how readers come to learn about and sign-up for the free email newsletter, is somewhat unusual. The free email newsletter isn’t mentioned on the home page of the Website at all; you only learn about it after you’ve entered a half dozen pieces of personal information, including your height, weight and email address, to request a free diet profile.

I reviewed seven issues of The Daily Dish, sent the week of March 11, 2007, in order to write this review. So how did the weigh-in go? There are some healthy things about this free email newsletter:

• The from line is consistent from send to send and easily recognizable to recipients
• Everything that should be there is included in the footer
• It’s no small task to avoid making the subject line of a diet email sound spammy – here they succeed.

And a few things that should not be part of a well-balanced email program:

• The first screen isn’t as engaging as it could (and should) be
• Fatty sales copy, rather than good-for-you editorial, makes up the bulk of the content
• A big chunk of the preview pane is taken up by a third-party advertisement—not the best use of prime real estate