June 16, 2004
Bloomba 2.0 Googles Your E-Mail
New version does instant searches on your e-mails and on your calendar.
NEW YORK (AP) _ It pains me to watch people scroll through their e-mail queues, like rummagers through cluttered attics, in search of a particular message.
I know better. For my personal e-mail I use a year-old program called Bloomba that's been called the Google of e-mail. Version 2.0 is out this week and adds calendars, which are also searchable.
If you don't save e-mails, or you never need to go back and consult a saved message, or your memory is photographic, Bloomba's not for you. It's for e-mail swimmers who left the shallows long ago.
Bloomba was built on the premise that much of the time you're ``in e-mail'' you're trying to ferret out an old message. But is Bloomba's Personal edition, from tiny Stata Labs Inc., really worth the $60?
After all, most people already have an e-mail program _ or use free Web-based e-mail. They don't give e-mail management much thought, which is surely fine with Microsoft Corp. Its Outlook Express, a bare-bones pauper for features, ships with nearly every Windows-based computer.
People who want more features usually opt for Microsoft's Outlook, largely because it's included with the Office suite, which you can buy for $150.
Like Bloomba, Outlook has a very good built-in filter for spurning spam. But Outlook verily crawls in searches. I use it at work, and quickly get tired of watching the little magnifying glass icon circle clockwise while I await results.
Also, while Outlook's power in the corporate world stems from features enabled by back office servers, such as the sharing of address books and calendars among co-workers, Bloomba is a better alternative for home power users and small businesses.
For starters, it's nearly instantaneous.
You can search e-mails simply by keyword or according to a number of variables. Sift and sort by category using color codes, set up rules for handling e-mail from certain senders such as newsletter producers. You can also search the personal information manager and any calendars you create.
Outlook offers much of this, but Bloomba does it better _ its organizing system and searchability will delight heavy e-mailers who hate filing messages in subfolders. In fact, they may stop filing altogether. (To search e-mail at work, I recently began testing the $99 X1, which also indexes files on your entire computer. Another indexing program, the $40 Nelson Email Organizer, runs in tandem with Outlook and works a lot like Bloomba. Both are good.)
Another Bloomba advantage: It's immune to all those Internet-borne viruses that Microsoft's e-mail clients help propagate. It won't spread them.
People just might support Bloomba for another reason: If you like tech diversity versus Microsoft hegemony it's a good way to cast your vote. Analyst Maurene Caplan Gray of Gartner estimates that well over 80 percent of home users rely on Outlook Express while the full Outlook boasts about 40 percent of the global corporate market.
Oh, and Bloomba supports RSS feeds, which is a way of getting Internet content alerts delivered directly to your desktop, bypassing visits to Web sites that offer them. Outlook itself doesn't offer RSS.
But one big question nags: If Google itself is now on the verge of offering searchable Web-based electronic mail with its Gmail service, doesn't that mean death for Bloomba?
Perhaps, but I like to be in control of my e-mail; I won't entrust my mail store to someone's Internet-based servers. Sure, there are privacy concerns. But there are also simple reliability concerns. Those servers get wiped clean and there goes your e-mail.
Gmail is offering over 1 gigabyte of storage and Yahoo just announced it's boosting its free Web mail to 100 megabytes. That's tens of thousands of e-mails worth. Bloomba measures up in volume. It can handle more than 2 gigabytes of data with ease. Chief technology officer Raymie Stata says it generally starts slowing down at about 3.2 gigabytes.
I've got just a few gripes about Bloomba. You can't save e-mail items to a calendar in Bloomba, as you can in Outlook. And Bloomba lacks a ``to-do list'' component for prioritizing tasks. Also, this is a Windows-only product. Neither a Linux nor a Mac version exist.
A Bloomba Professional edition ($90), which Stata promises for July, will allows users to share multiple calendars and contacts with colleagues as well as synchronize their entire Bloomba data store with handhelds running the Palm operating system.
I'm among those who believe that e-mail is by and large broken. But we all use it daily, and until it can be replaced, I'll stick with Bloomba.
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