When Bloomba came out in March, I noticed how much like an email-only version of Google this installed-program mail client was.

With the subsequent releases of Gmail and, more recently, Google Desktop Search, Bloomba’s business model seemed to be getting bulldozed by Google. When you can get the same functionality for free, why pay for it?

So it’s not surprising that Bloomba’s parent company, Stata Labs, has sold itself to Yahoo!, getting out while the getting’s still good.

It’s also not surprising that Yahoo!’s only after the Bloomba technology, and nothing else that Stata might have cooked up:

However, the $60 product will be discontinued and Yahoo has no plans to sell Bloomba or its accompanying spam filter software, SA Proxy Pro, Stata Labs said on its Web site.

That could indicate plans to incorporate the underlying technology in an e-mail client that could compete with Gmail, which Google launched in April and which offers users full searching of their own e-mail boxes and 1 gigabyte of space to store messages.

So it looks like Google has changed the game once again. Just as competing search engines started imitating adopting Google’s interface and results presentation, other Webmail clients are going to start looking more and more like Gmail. Bloomba, as an established product, represents a way for Yahoo! to get there a little quicker; other providers will have to start from scratch.