A method is disclosed that provides a way to manage the registrations of telecommunications endpoints, and to prioritize those registered endpoints, or “contacts,” that belong to a user, without some of the disadvantages in the prior art. The technique of the illustrative embodiment, which is referred to as “contact priority reordering,” prioritizes the contacts that are associated with a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) public address of a user, without having to modify any endpoints. Moreover, the technique is interoperable with any SIP endpoint. The technique can be regarded as a reordering process because it overrides any endpoint ordering that occurs at a registrar server as a consequence of the registrations and re-registrations of the individual endpoints. Advantageously, the technique prioritizes the contacts that are associated with a particular public address without requiring that any changes be made to the registrar server—or to any other SIP servers.