Fast Company article on Bloomba, new email program based on a powerful search engine.
Bloomba is based on a search engine-style toolbar, rather than a hierarchical system of folders. The program has a familiar look: Outlook-like menus, and a top-line toolbar with familiar icons for send/receive, compose, delete, etc.–plus delete as spam, which handily tells the software to eliminate any future messages from the sender before they hit your inbox. Immediately below this row of icons, however, is a search toolbar that looks like the one on your Web browser. You use it the same way: Type in a keyword, hit return, and see what turns up.
This is Bloomba’s great innovation: the ability to retrieve comprehensive search results from within one’s own inbox. Searching for the keyword “Bloomba” in my inbox, for example, quickly turned up messages sent to me by someone with a Bloomba email address, emails from my editor with “Bloomba” in the subject line or message body, and messages that I sent to execs at Bloomba while experimenting with the product. Bloomba even searches text attachments.
