Bloomba

» see bloomba.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Bloomba was sold to people who paid money for email software. In 2003 in Turkey i did not know a single person who did. Mail was a webmail account you opened in a browser, at home on a phone line or at a cafe with the machine somebody else had set up, and buying a program to read it with was not a thought anybody had.

So this is a grave for a product i never ran, written by somebody who agrees completely with the argument it was making. Stata Labs was founded in 2002 by Raymie Stata, who had come out of Digital's Systems Research Center, where he worked on AltaVista. That single fact explains the entire company. A person who had helped build a search engine for the whole web looked at his own inbox and concluded the problem was that nobody had bothered to index it.

It was shown at IDG's DEMO conference in february 2003 and went on sale that october. The front page called its intended buyer a power emailer and asked whether you spent more than two hours a day in email, which in 2003 was a genuinely rude question. The tagline on the logo read simplified email, organized life. Version 1.0 would install next to Outlook or Eudora without fighting either of them, a deliberate decision to be a second opinion rather than a migration.

It was also a 1.0 in the honest sense. The support FAQ shipped with that first release admits that the client did not do SMTP authentication at all, so anybody trying to send through smtp.mail.yahoo.com simply could not, and the recommended workaround was to send through your ISP instead because those servers usually did not ask. Version 2.0 landed in may 2004 with a calendar attached to the same index, so a keyword search would surface an appointment and the messages tangled up with it together.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it did that outlook could not ~

Outlook in 2003 kept your mail in a PST file and searched it by walking through it. Ask it to find a word inside an attachment from two years ago and you could get up and make tea. Bloomba kept what it called a datastore and maintained a real full-text index over the message bodies and the attachments alike, so the answer came back while you were still typing. PC Magazine put the gap at up to eight times.

The other half was spam. Stata Labs also sold SAproxy, a local proxy that ran SpamAssassin against your incoming mail before the client saw it, and Bloomba had a checkbox to route through it. That coupling produced the single most-asked support question of the product's life, because unchecking the box was never obvious and the client would report an unexpected end of stream when SAproxy was configured but not running.

~ the buyer and the burial ~

Yahoo had already bought Oddpost in july 2004. In october it bought Stata Labs as well, and the notice that went up on bloomba.com is dated 20 october. Wikipedia and the acquisition trackers date the deal 21 october and the trade press ran it on the 22nd, so pick whichever you like; the company's own announcement page carries the 20th and is the closest thing to a primary record.

The notice is worth reading for its tone. It is delighted to be joining Yahoo, it declines to say anything about what happens to the technology, and buried in the FAQ underneath is the part that actually mattered to customers. Anybody who had bought Bloomba or SAproxy Pro in the previous thirty days could have their money back by emailing support before 21 november 2004. Everybody else got one year of online support from their purchase date and nothing after that. Yahoo confirmed to reporters that it would not continue selling either product. It had bought a team and a search index, and the shipping software was packaging.

~ where the code went ~

The code did get one more life. In may 2005 Corel licensed Bloomba and shipped it as WordPerfect Mail, a component of the WordPerfect Office family, which is roughly the software equivalent of being rehomed with a distant relative. The name Bloomba never appeared again.

bloomba.com stopped being updated almost immediately. The last archived capture of anything on it is from june 2007 and it was the acquisition notice the whole time. Today the domain answers nothing on either scheme. statalabs.com is slightly stranger: over https it returns a bare 403 from an openresty server, and over plain http it returns nothing at all, so somebody holds the name and has pointed it at a box that refuses to talk.

~ the man who ended up running yahoo ~

Raymie Stata went with the company. He stayed at Yahoo through the whole decline, and in 2010 he was made its chief technology officer. He left in 2012 and started Altiscale, which sold managed Hadoop and was bought by SAP in 2016 for a reported figure above $125 million.

Which leaves the sequence: he built a search engine, then built an email client around search, then sold that client to a portal that immediately killed it, and six years later the portal made him the person in charge of all of its technology. The product died and the argument it was making won so completely that nobody now remembers there was ever an argument. Every mail client made since indexes your mail. Nobody sells that as a feature because nobody would buy the version without it.

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