# Bloomba Over Mozilla?


By Ben Ramsey

Published on February 25, 2004


I just read "The Google of Email?" in the March issue of Fast Company.  In this article, Alison Overholt examines flaws in Microsoft Outlook and looks for a competing e-mail client to take its place.  The good alternative client, she concludes, is Bloomba.  The folks at Bloomba must've paid her for this blatant attempt at publicity; she doesn't review any other competitors. The major reason she recommends Bloomba is for its search features.  The "powerful [search] feature makes folders largely unnecessary," says Overholt.

Bloomba has several major drawbacks, however, as she mentions in her article.  These are: the inability to use IMAP (Bloomba is POP3-only), the lack of a calendar/task feature, and a $49.95 price tag.  Each of these features and more (excluding the hefty price tag) may be found in Mozilla Thunderbird, a free client that she failed to mention.

I can't imagine why she overlooked Mozilla Thunderbird.  It used to be Netscape, so it's not entirely new or foreign.  Plus, it's open-source and free and offers many extensions (with more on the way) that by far overshadow the features in Outlook and Bloomba.  Thunderbird allows connections to IMAP servers.  Thunderbird has a good search feature.  There are excellent junk mail filters.  If a calendar is what you want, then there's an extension for Thunderbird that provides calendar and task-list functionality.  In fact, since the application is open-source, there are many more extensions to choose from with more on the way (due to the fact that there is a community of developers creating them).

Clearly, the better alternative to the bug-ridden and cumbersome Microsoft Outlook is Mozilla Thunderbird.  Perhaps only in time will others begin to see this.

## Related Web sites

* [Mozilla Thunderbird](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/)
* [Bloomba](http://web.archive.org/web/20040208231219/http://www.statalabs.com/)
* [Fast Company (March 2004)](http://web.archive.org/web/20040427001535/http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/80/index.html)
* [Mozilla Thunderbird extensions](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/)