Bloomba: Putting an End to the Frantic Search for E-mail Building a Better Email Client Adam Stone
Can you even imagine conducting business today without e-mail? An invaluable tool, e-mail keeps information moving and provides a clutter-free way to save copies of important messages and documents. Trouble is, we quickly amass hundreds, if not thousands of messages. And while they may be neatly tucked away somewhere, they're also virtually impossible to find.
Enter Bloomba, an e-mail client whose claim to fame is its ability to rapidly search and retrieve stored e-mail messages. Stata Labs offers Bloomba Professional Edition at $89.99 for a single license along with Bloomba Personal for $59.95. Along with all of the standard features in the personal edition, Bloomba Professional offers two additional key features for SMBs — shared calendaring for group scheduling needs and synch-to-Palm capability.
While Outlook also searches saved messages, Bloomba does it up to eight times faster. And while some of the other mail clients offer search capabilities, none are as extensive or as efficient as Bloomba's.
Bloomba installs quickly and easily. A wizard imports all existing mail, mail settings, and contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express (although it doesn't import your message filtering rules), and there's a fundamental failsafe: you can install Bloomba alongside either Outlook/Outlook Express or Eudora without interfering with the operation of the other e-mail client.
Building a Better Bloomba
The software's latest major release, v2.0, overcomes a few of the hurdles that held back earlier editions. In particular, customers complained about the lack of an address book.
While previous versions of Bloomba simply remembered addresses based on past correspondence, the new professional version includes an improved Contacts tool that makes organizing address book information significantly easier.
The Professional Edition also offers sophisticated calendaring functions. You can search calendars by keyword and make new calendar entries while viewing e-mail without having to toggle between screens. SMB owners take note: Bloomba's shared "Multiple Calendars" function lets your employees download and configure co-workers' calendars — handy for team projects.
As any good e-mail client should, Bloomba blasts spam. It relies on an integrated version of Stata Labs' SAproxy Pro 2.0, which is built on the open-source SpamAssassin.
Another handy feature — and a fairly unique one for an e-mail client — is Bloomba's Smart Groups feature, which helps you manage both RSS news feeds and opt-in email subscriptions. With most RSS readers only available as standalone utilities at this point, it's refreshing to see a mail client include an integrated RSS reader.
But it's Bloomba's speedy search function that's generated the most buzz for this product — and for good reason. Searching by keyword(s) lets you locate documents that have been sitting in remote corners of your hard drive for quite some time.
It's a quick and convenient way to manage mail without having to devote endless hours organizing or searching for messages.
