home | talk | editorial | r.i.p. abbamail
|
R.I.P. ABBAMAIL | 4 November 2008
Last week the famous ABBA website ABBAMAIL closed its digital doors. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It's dead. It's a stiff (quoting Monty Python's famous parrot sketch) ABBAMAIL was for many fans the basics of internet ABBA fandom in the last twelve years. What originally started out as a mailing list became so much more. It was a community, a place for healthy debates, a superb site for all the latest ABBA news and much more. It was a place where people came together who had at least one thing in common: their love for ABBA music. Fortunately site owners Graeme Read and Grant Whittingham made sure that the mailing list has been transferred to another fan. So the ultimate core of ABBAMAIL has been preserved. That was a great gesture from two men who no longer consider themselves ABBA fans. The fact that the site was shutdown came as a great shock for me. I didn't see it coming at all. There had been a few hard times in the past for the site, but I thought that G&G had survived everything. Obviously the site, the mailing list and their 2006 battle with Universal worn them out. If you read their statements about the demise of ABBAMAIL at www.abbamail.com, you will understand why they called it a day. It makes me terribly sad that this happens to fans that devote a great part of their lives to a pop group. The obituaries that ABBA fans from all over the world sent to the new mailing list ABBA Village showed how much ABBAMAIL meant to them. Some people made long lasting and very close personal friendships because of ABBAMAIL. What ABBAMAIL did for me, can't be expressed in a couple of words. Most of all it inspired me to stay ABBA fan no matter what. It inspired me to continue work on ABBA Plaza, it inspired me to write a book about ABBA fandom and much more. Sometimes when my ABBA fandom slowly faded away, I could rely on ABBAMAIL to keep the flame burning. And now it's time to say R.I.P. ABBAMAIL. I pay respect to Graeme and Grant who created ABBAMAIL: a unique place in ABBA history. Thank you guys for everything you did! |
All editorials:
|
