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Mac Mail and not so Smart Groups

Avatar Rick Churchill
I regularly send out emails to a group. I have put a 2 letter tag reference in the Company field in Contacts and made a Smart Group which looks for this tag. When I click on the Smart Group title in the sidebar of Contacts it shows all the members in alphabetical order.

When I send out an email using this group if I expand the group the email recipients are all jumbled up and when I get a complaint that a particular email wasn't received it is harder to check that the email has been sent to a particular member. Is there any way of ensuring that the list is in alphabetical order?

I know that I can click on the group and open in Contacts but the contacts list may have been tampered with after sending the email (see "Contacts are escaping to Google")

Re: Mac Mail and not so Smart Groups

Avatar Rick Churchill
Mick provided me a logical answer to my query at the AUG last night. The Contacts app is fundamentally a database and although when requested to provide a list, reformats it's output so that they appear in alphabetical order, in all probability the records are held internally in the order in which they were first entered into the database.

Making a group would just set a flag against particular entries or apply the rule for that group to each entry in turn as and when the group is required. The output would just appear putting in the header of the email in the order in which they were found i.e. the order in which they were first entered or even perhaps amended.

As It is usually unimportant to put the recipients in alphabetical order Apple do dot consider it worth reformatting the list.
 
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