Former Bloomba Appears As WordPerfect Mail

Corel Tuesday rolled out WordPerfect Mail, a stand-alone e-mail client based on technology now owned by Yahoo that stresses search.

Designed for home users and small businesses, WordPerfect Mail is a renamed, reworked version of Bloomba, a client that Yahoo acquired in October 2004, for its search sensibilities as it looks to go head to head with Google's Gmail. Before that, however, WordPerfect had struck a deal with Bloomba's creators, Stata Labs, to use it as the foundation for WordPerfect Mail.

"The technology behind WordPerfect Mail was originally conceived with a question: Why is it you can find anything on the Internet, but you can't find an e-mail you sent last week?" asked Richard Carriere of Corel in a statement. "With that question in mind, Stata Labs developed Bloomba, the world's first search-based e-mail program. Now the same outstanding experience is available thanks to WordPerfect Mail."

Corel claims that WordPerfect Mail can find messages, contacts, and calendar items "dozens of times faster" than competing products, such as Microsoft's Outlook.

The stand-alone POP3 and IMAP client also supports RSS feeds; filters out spam using another product from the former Stata Labs, SA Proxy Pro; and includes the usual mail client contact and scheduling features.

WordPerfect Mail is available as part of Corel's WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition -- one of the few remaining competitors for Microsoft Office -- or separately for $69. A free 30-day trial can be downloaded from Corel's Web site as a 42MB file.