Thanks to Mike Curreri (yeah, Paul’s dad) who turned me on to Bloomba the other day. In the past seven years, I’ve been an on-again, off-again Eudora user for personal e-mail, and finally switched to Outlook Express about 18 months ago. (If only I still had all seven years of mail.)
In any event, I’m drowning in e-mail (even if SpamCop is back up): between personal e-mail and e-mail related to the Dean campaign I’m getting well over 100 personal e-mails a day (that doesn’t take into account the equal number of corporate e-mails I’m getting a day).
Enter Bloomba. I can’t even begin to explain how it works (I’m sure I’ll stare at it long enough to figure it out, but right now I don’t really care): it just works. The idea is that instead of using folders to sort your e-mail, it indexes everything. Want to find a message? Just type in the words that describe the e-mail. Searches I’ve done have taken less than a second. This is the first time I’ve felt like I can Google my e-mail. (Yes, this contradicts what I said the other day. Maybe this is an answer?) You can still use folders if you want to, but after just a few hours of use I can see how folders become far less important.
It can automatically import your Outlook and/or Outlook Express e-mail and contacts (importing over 10,000 messages from Outlook Express took less than 10 minutes), and the UI is quite elegant — you definitely won’t feel like you’ve traded down if you’re a regular OE user.
Oh — it also includes a spam filter called SA Proxy, a Bayesian filter that learns what’s spam and what isn’t, allows you to explicitly identify which languages you’ll accept e-mail in, etc. It works with any POP3 mail client, but paired with Bloomba it’s more powerful.
One other thing — it appears to have a built-in RSS reader, though I haven’t explored it at all.
I’ll follow up with more info, but if you’re looking for a solution to managing the chaos that has become your inbox, Bloomba seems to be a great fit. There’s a 30 day trial; $60 to buy.
I am glad you have also found Bloomba useful. It has been a long time coming. Nothing I have seen works anything like it. The interface could use some work (which I am sure it will get), including the ability to "resend" a message, better control the UI, etc. But it is a winner, even as-is.
ReplyDeleteSo far, it's a good attempt.
ReplyDeleteIn a few more years it may work half as
well as Courier - the best there is.