ABBAMAIL

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

~ the eulogy ~

The ABBAMAIL e-mail list went live on 13 January 1997. It existed because the list ABBA fans already had, Abba-List, was run tightly enough that people complained about what they were not allowed to say on it. Graeme Read and Grant Whittingham had been president and treasurer of the Australian ABBA Fan Club between 1976 and 1983, so the two of them starting a rival in Sydney twenty years later was less a startup than a second shift.

Hundreds joined in the first months and a web site followed quickly. It ran monthly columns and regular news, and kept an archive of pictures and press releases. Money came in through paid list membership and an online shop, while the forum and the chat room stayed open to anyone.

The conventions were the part that needed a room. Six of them ran in Sydney between March 1997 and September 2005, with the same shape each time: merchandise in the morning, rare video nobody present had seen, a guest speaker taking questions, and a disco after dinner. Annie Wright, who had worked at RCA and traveled with the group on the Australian tour, spoke in 1997, and ABBA's former RCA promotional manager Shelley Benson spoke in 1999. Carl Magnus Palm came in 2001.

January 1997 is a year ahead of my first e-mail address, and ABBA was never the distance here. The songs reached Turkey the way they reached everywhere else. What was out of reach was the room: a paid list administered out of Sydney, with a shop that mailed physical discs to people who had met each other in person.

~ the dossier ~

~ the original negatives ~

In 1997 all eight ABBA studio albums were remastered and reissued. The audiophiles on the list heard the problems immediately and said so at length, about the mastering and then about how bad the covers looked. The original negatives were eventually tracked down and used, which produced the first properly sharp ABBA covers of the CD era. The list was also asked for help finding material for the ABBA In Concert and ABBA: The Movie DVD releases, and Carl Magnus Palm thanked it by name in Bright Lights, Dark Shadows.

~ what mipi wanted ~

In May 2006 the shop attracted Music Industry Piracy Investigations, acting for Universal Music. ABBAMAIL had been selling discs of television appearances that were not commercially available and of concerts recorded at home, and according to ABBAMAIL the record company had known for years and had not previously minded. The first demand was that everything carrying the ABBA logo come out of the shop. That was done.

The second demand was for the names and addresses of every fan who had bought anything. That was refused, and the list turned into a campaign instead, with members writing to the record company and to the group's representatives. It ended on 15 September 2006, with MIPI satisfied and nothing further pending. ABBAMAIL put the cost of the episode at over four thousand Australian dollars in legal fees.

~ the xara page ~

abbamail.com still answers, with a single page of about thirteen kilobytes built in Xara's HTML export and carrying a copyright line that reads 2020. The text is three sentences from the founders. The list ran from January 1997 until November 2008 and it brought ABBA fans together from across the world. The two of them are no longer involved in ABBA fandom, the page says, but can be reached by anyone with a personal connection to them.

The dates do not quite line up. Wikipedia's infobox closes the web site on 28 October 2008, while the page the founders left behind says the community ran until November. Nothing in either source gives a reason, and the archive of press releases and photographs that the site was known for is not on the page that replaced it.

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