Suppose you want to invite a bunch of friends over to watch a movie. You start to write an email and start adding your friends’ email addresses. You probably add addresses in the order you think of them; maybe you think about who lives nearby, or who you’ve seen most recently. If you’re like most people, you probably stop there, send the email, and proceed to have a lovely evening with your friends.

If you’re like me, though, you start worrying that somebody might be offended that they’re near the bottom of the recipient list. What to do? My approach is usually to alphabetize the list after I’ve added everybody. That way, anybody who’s looking at the list carefully enough to be offended will notice that it’s alphabetized and doesn’t imply any kind of preferential ranking. Sorting the list by hand, though, is tedious and error-prone. To that end (and also to learn more about writing Mac software), I’ve written a little doohickey for Mac OS X that will alphabetize email address lists on demand.

You may have noticed a “Services” menu under Mac OS X. It lives in the application menu (if you’re reading this in Firefox, it would be in the menu labeled “Firefox”), and has a bunch of system-wide contextual actions. The thing I’ve written — the Email Address Sort Service — adds an “Alphabetize Email Addresses” item to that menu. The idea is that you type a bunch of email addresses into the To: field of the email client of your choice (either a client-side application or a webmail application), select all of the addresses, choose “Alphabetize Email Addresses”, and then the email addresses get sorted in place.

The sorting algorithm is smart enough to recognize “real names” mixed in with email addresses. It will try to alphabetize first by real name (last name first), then by email address if all else fails. The service can be downloaded from the project page, which also has some usage instructions.

In terms of the people-who-care to hours-spent-on-project ratio, I suspect this is personal low for me. Still, if you find this useful or can think of ways to make it better, I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks!

(Also, I’m aware that this doesn’t work with the Firefox 3.0 series. Firefox 3.0 doesn’t support Mac OS X services, but I hear 3.5 may.)