Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

January 14, 2023

Manager upset about order of recipients in email

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:38 PM

There are a lot of people who are really concerned about their power & position, and will go to any lengths to ensure that everyone around them knows how powerful/senior they are. The below screenshot came up in one of my feeds a while ago and I found it to be really funny and all together ridiculous.

Didn't occur to me this is issue for some people.

One of the middle managers from one of our branch sent me an email, politely pointing out that he should be ahead of some recipient in TO field in the email I sent.

It was reply to me only not touching on the subject just pointing out the order.

Told him that's not part of our corporate culture and we don't do that.

Checked his AD account and he's new in company, account created 3 months ago.

When I craft the email I add people randomly from my head or alphabetically if I pull them from address book.

Seems silly thing to obsess about, order of recipient in email based on position, hierarchy.

Anyone encountered this before?
Manager upset about order of recipient in an email

What is even more funny is that people with actual power/position will not pull nonsense like this because they don’t need to. It’s only people who have little power who want to pretend that they have a lot. I have had the unfortunate ‘pleasure’ of dealing with some of these folks and it is always a massive pain because their ego will take any thing as an offense against them and will react accordingly to put the person in place. The only thing these folks will give any notice to is the people above them in power and for them they will do anything and everything to keep them happy.

This is one of the sillier examples that I have heard. Personally, I choose the email addresses in the order I remember them, starting with the main people (the people to whom the email is addressed) followed by the people who need to know what I am talking about in the email. I remember reading somewhere that folks in business schools and one of the big 4 consulting firms actually train people in what order the email addresses need to be listed but I can’t find the reference now. I think that is just a waste of time and energy which the person sending the email should that time on something useful or just take a short break instead of this nonsense.

I do remember having been called out for putting one of the senior people in the CC field instead of the To field even though they were just copied as a courtesy to keep them aware of what was going on. Going forward I remembered putting them in the To field but always found it silly. For me the To field is for the people the mail is addressed to or the people who need to action something on the email, the rest go into the CC field. For emails sent to me (I am in the To field), I have a rule that marked emails where I was in the To field in a specific color so that I knew those were emails I might need to action and that has worked great for me in combination to all my other email rules.

What do you think? Does the order of names in the email matter?

– Suramya

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