How do you know what order your recipients open them in? ;-)

By including myself in the list of email addresses

My comment was intended to be mildly humorous, as I don't imagine you expect your various recipients to open their messages in alphabetic order. And there's no way at all you can influence the order in which they RECEIVE their messages, is there? That depends on how and when they collect messages from their respective mail servers.

You've made up your own terminology, so I'm going to assume that "group directory" means a Mailing List.

A Mailing List is sorted by the order in which you populated it, so unless you have gone out of your way to remove and re-add Contacts to assert alphabetical order, it won't be in any particular order. You can view it in alphabetical order in the Address Book, but that won't affect the processing order.

I'm wondering why the processing order is of any importance to you, so long as all the addressees get their messages.

Many thanks for your help - part of the mailing was 'inherited' so that would explain the random order. The solution would appear to be create another mailing list from scratch in alphabetical order. Having all the recipients in order makes it look efficient and is easier to check all the names are there! Since you've been so helpful, may I ask another question? The email leaves my PC with just the display name but on receipt, you get the display name plus the email address - is it possible for the recipient just to receive the display name without the full email details (I appreciate they will be there if the display name is clicked on)

I think the difficulty here is that the email system needs the full address, so it is somewhere in the email message, which you have indicated you understand. Whether or not the recipient sees the email address, or the name, or a nickname is, I suspect, a property of the recipient's email client and is not something you, as the sender, have any influence over. (Having said that, I understand the content of an email message is somewhat arbitrary, and the real addressing goes on in the "envelope", which we never see. But I don't know of a way to control what Thunderbird puts into the to and from addressing fields.)

Thunderbird, for instance, will insert the so-called "display name" from your Address Book when it spots a match between an address in a message and a known Contact in your Address Book. This feature can be disabled, but we don't know what our correspondents' email clients will do. Thunderbird also has add-ons that will specifically extract the email address from the header, ignoring (as far as is possible) whatever your Address Book says, or what the sender wanted you to see.

Many thanks - we'll leave it there now