I complained last week about Stata Labs, makers of the soon-to-be-extinct Bloomba e-mail client, for abandoning their customers in the wake of their acquisition by Yahoo. Having used Bloomba for quite some time, and knowing from Stata’s announcement that the software was not part of Yahoo’s plans for the company, I (and most other Bloomba users) had reached the conclusion that we had to move back to Outlook. But while importing Outlook e-mail into Bloomba was a snap, getting Bloomba e-mail back into Outlook is a laborious process. If Stata cared about all the customers it was abandoning, I reasoned, they would create a utility to handle the process.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Stata tech support in reply to a query I sent about a week ago. And while a week is too long to wait for any tech support response, I was heartened by this: “We will be providing a tool to export your Bloomba mail to Outlook in the coming weeks. You will be informed when it is available.”

Of course, I have already handled the e-mail migration. I would have waited if I had gotten this announcement sooner. Still, Stata is to be lauded for taking a step they don’t have to. Whether they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts or they were beseiged by complaints is something we may never know. But they are doing the right thing.