I’ve been using the new Bloomba e-mail program for a few days now, so I thought I’d write about my first impressions.
Installation and set-up were a breeze. Bloomba provides a wizard which imported all of my mail, and mail settings from Outlook 2000. The things that did not come across were my rules to move mail to different folders. The folder concept is where Bloomba gets interesting. Although it provides support for folders, it seems to frown upon using them. The program is really geared towards building views of the messages in your inbox. It treats the inbox as a database, and provides many tools to allow you to slice & dice the data (messages). This ‘views’ concept will be very familiar to people familiar with SQL. It’s a paradigm shift, which I’m starting to like. But I get the feeling that such a paradigm shift will be a tough sell to the average user. This is definitely a power user’s application.
Some things that are missing (or that I haven’t found yet): There is no address book, but they say it’s in the works. Here’s how they get around that for now:
Bloomba 1.0 PR4 does not have an address book that allows for user input, although this feature is coming soon. Bloomba instead has an internal contact list that is automatically populated through your email correspondence. Currently all e-mail addresses used in the auto-complete feature are remembered by the program in any From, To, or CC field based on past correspondence. Once you import your mail, your email contacts will be more comprehensive than your old address book!
That’s all well and good, but I want my damn address book! The lack of an address book also prevents you from making a distribution list, as far as I can tell. I also don’t see a way to tell Bloomba to leave messages on the server for X days. Nor a way to tell it when to delete messages from the server. All I see is a simple ‘leave messages on the server or not’ option. It also needs a ‘number of unread messages’ indicator on each folder/view. Hopefully these features will be added soon.
So Bloomba is a very powerful program that provides some nice tools to organize & simplify e-mail management. I’ll keep running it in parallel with Outlook for a while, but I think I’ll drop Outlook once Bloomba adds the address book.
Update: OK, I’m loving the ability to group messages by subscriptions or by threads. This drastically cuts down on inbox clutter, as I’ve even created subscriptions for high-volume friends. 🙂
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