Sort Email recipient

Question

_{Monday, May 9, 2011 7:44 PM}

How to setup outlook 2010 client sort email recipient before send out email? 

For eample, I am sending Email to John/Jack/Tom/Mike, outlook automatically sort by name to Jack/John/Mike/Tom.

Thanks

Thanks,

All replies (8)

_{Wednesday, May 11, 2011 2:54 AM ✅Answered}

Hi there,

So far as I know, there is no such settings in Outlook can sort the recipient in the to field.

Try this suggestion as a workaround:

Here is one way to do this. There may be other ways. Instead of adding to a message create a distribution list in your contacts folder (In the Contacts folder click on New -> Distribution List) adding all the victims you wish. Once you have entered the addresses click on the File-> Save As in the distribution list window. Save it as a .TXT file. By the way, Outlook will stop you if you attempt to enter the same e-mail address a second time.

You can then read this Tab delimited file into Excel or other program. If you use Excel you can then sort, slice and dice to taste.

You can then use Import to bring in an XLS file in as a new distribution list.

This is a bit of work but not horrible.

Hope it helps.

Sincerely,
Max Meng

Come back and mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

_{Tuesday, May 10, 2011 10:29 AM}

To me this seems not as a bug, but as a feature!

I'm also wondering why the sequence of recipients does make sense ;)

Kind regards, Arjan Vos (NL)

VosAJM - Woerden (NL)

_{Friday, August 17, 2012 2:25 PM | 1 vote}

Hi, Arjan.

It is certainly not the case of Netherlands, but in some countries this is used to avoid problems of using an sequence that is not in line with company hierarchy - alphabetic order is generally accepted without complaints. It is weird, but I heard that this already happened in a branch of the company I work.

Regards.

Luiz (BR)

_{Thursday, November 15, 2012 10:58 AM}

Hi

You can create contact group 1John, 2Jack, 3Tom, 4Mike and another group AllEmails with these groups as members.

When sending to AllEmails group, Outlook will show original e-mails from John/Jack/Tom/Mike and follow desired order in To field.

_{Saturday, May 28, 2016 9:18 AM | 1 vote}

Hi,

as I had the same issue and there is still now native solution around, I made a simple javascript application here: http://mail.bitcrumb.com

Just use the Outlook auto-complete/ auto-suggest feature to set up your list of recipients. Copy and paste the whole list (resp. any text containing mail addresses) to the left-hand side and you'll receive the list of all recipients in alphabetical order on the right-hand side. :)

Best

_{Tuesday, September 6, 2016 10:52 PM}

That's pretty neat, but it doesn't work for places where Outlook shows recipients in "LastName, FirstName" format but the addresses are in "[email protected]" format.

Your script sorts them by email address, so when I paste them back into Outlook the names are out of order with regards to peoples' last names.

Could you please modify it to allow sorting by last name?

Thanks

_{Wednesday, May 17, 2017 10:00 AM}

Thank you :) 

After paste your right list on To field i clicked on "check names" to recognize each email (Y)

Thank you so much :)

_{Friday, August 17, 2018 4:36 PM}

There is a free Sort Message Recipients Outlook add-in that does exactly what you want.

Alexey Kuznetsov,
Relief Software
More than 150 free add-ins for Outlook