Speedy Searches of E-Mail Offered

The biggest challenge of e-mail isn't reading messages when they arrive, it's finding them two weeks later when you really need them. Solving that is the goal of Bloomba, a new e-mail client that makes search functions a priority.

Developer Stata Labs claims Bloomba will make finding a message sent five months ago as easy as finding one from five minutes ago. The $50 program is now available, along with a new spam filter.

Fast Finder

The key difference between Bloomba and other e-mail clients like Outlook or Eudora is its search function, says Stata Labs' Raymie Stata, co-founder and chief technology officer. While other e-mail clients have search functions, they're frequently slow to work their way through your in-box and sometimes they don't bring up documents you know are somewhere in your mountain of mail.

Stata representatives say Bloomba's search function is far faster and more customizable. You can search for all of a series of words, any of the words, or for messages that don't include any of the designated terms. And you can search the entirety of all your messages, or confine the search to just the subject line or to certain folders. Bloomba can also search for words in attachments, and is the only e-mail client with that capability, according to Stata.

Stata representatives also report that many of the program's 40,000 beta testers say they no longer worry about creating separate folders for different subjects, because the search function works so well. Instead, they search for messages relating to that subject, then save the search so they can perform it again quickly. Saved searches show up like folders in a pane on the left side of the Bloomba window.

Other Features

Stata is tackling another major e-mail headache as well: spam. Bloomba comes bundled with the spam filter SpamAssassin, which is also sold separately for $30.

The program identifies messages that may be spam, and shunts them off to a spam folder. You can fine-tune the filter by clicking a button labeled "Delete as Spam" for bogus messages that slip into your in-box. If messages from, say, your boss get sent to the spam folder, you can click a "Not Spam" button.

Bloomba also supports Real Simple Syndication feeds of XML-based headlines and news. The program will grab the headlines and drop them directly into your in-box, put them into another folder, or leave them in your in-box for three days and then move them to another folder. The same sort of automation is possible with messages from mailing lists.

Bloomba runs only on Windows PCs. It will import messages from Outlook (though not from the version of Outlook about to debut, Outlook 2003), Outlook Express, Eudora, and Netscape Mail. You must have POP3 access to your e-mail to use Bloomba.