What Is Sort My List and What Can It Do?

Updated

Sort My List (sortmylist.com) is a browser-based list sorting and cleanup tool that alphabetizes, reorders, deduplicates, and reformats pasted text. You paste a list, choose an operation, and copy or download the result. According to the site, all processing happens in your browser and your list is never uploaded, so it suits contact lists, guest lists, email exports, and other text you'd rather not send to a server. It has been available since 2008.

What the tool is for

The site positions itself as a single-purpose editor: "Paste it below and pick what to do." Each operation is also exposed as a separate tool page with examples, and the site says your list follows you from tool to tool while staying in your browser. That makes it a practical fit when you have a messy block of text and need a clean, ordered version without opening a spreadsheet.

Core sorting options

The editor groups sorting actions by data type:

Category Options
Alphabetical A → Z, Z → A
Names By last name; addresses by last name; titles (ignoring "The", "A", "An")
Emails and URLs Emails by domain, web addresses by domain, links by their text
Numbers and dates Smallest → largest, largest → smallest, by date (oldest/newest first), by time of day, by month, by day of the week
Other Shortest → longest, reverse order, shuffle randomly, transpose rows and columns

The last-name sort is the one most people miss in a plain text editor: it reorders "Smith, John"-style entries correctly, and the title option keeps entries like "The Great Gatsby" filed under G rather than T.

Cleanup and formatting

Beyond ordering, the tool handles the cleanup work that usually precedes sorting:

  • Duplicates: remove duplicate lines, or use the email-specific tools to clean an email list, extract addresses from text, or remove one list from another (for unsubscribes and bounces).
  • Line breaks: remove all line breaks, or remove them while keeping paragraphs.
  • Spaces and characters: trim spaces from each item, remove extra whitespace, strip punctuation and symbols.
  • Item edits: swap word order ("Smith, John" → "John, Smith"), mirror text, change case (lower, UPPER, Title, Sentence, first letter, random), and add numbering or labels before or after items.
  • Find and replace: replace text with or without case sensitivity, and cut each item at a given string (delete before or after it).

How to use it

  1. Paste your list into the editor. The tool auto-detects how items are separated (new lines, blank lines, commas, semicolons, tabs, spaces, pipes), and you can override that choice.
  2. Pick an operation — for example, Alphabetize A → Z, By last name, or Remove duplicates.
  3. Choose how results should be separated (same as now, new lines, commas, and so on).
  4. Copy the result, download it as a .txt file, or print it. Undo and redo are available if a step goes wrong.

You can also open an existing text file instead of pasting.

Privacy and cost

The site states that everything happens in your browser and your list is never uploaded — the main reason to prefer it over a web service that processes lists server-side. It describes itself as free since 2008. The page mentions "subscribe" among its signals but provides no pricing details, so treat the free claim as the site's own description rather than a verified tier structure.

When it's a good fit — and when it isn't

Use Sort My List when you have plain text to order or clean: a guest list, a column copied out of a spreadsheet, an email export, or a list with inconsistent spacing and duplicates. The email tools (fixing typos, dropping bad or throwaway addresses, finding near matches like jon.smith@ vs. jonsmith@, merging CSV exports) cover contact-list maintenance that would otherwise need a spreadsheet or script.

It is not a spreadsheet: there are no formulas, columns of mixed data types, or persistent files. For large structured datasets or repeatable pipelines, a spreadsheet or script will serve you better. For one-off text cleanup where privacy matters, it's a direct fit.