Outlook email "groups" have suddenly disappeared; contacts still there but no groups.

Well, I suspect my trying to "jump the queue" (see further back in thread) to the new outlook.com mail isn't going to achieve anything because the new version is now out of preview and being rolled out, first in North America, then everywhere else, over the next few weeks. See

https://blogs.office.com/2016/02/17/outlook-com-out-of-preview-and-better-than-ever/

I'd say that the method of restoring groups from a previous outgoing email is the only way forward until the rollout comes my way, not being in North America. Inconvenient, so the end result had better be as good as the "better-than-ever" thread promises.

I did the same once, and after some days, the group dissapear again. Today i did it again

I hope it does not dissappear again

Somebody know how many contact i can have in a group ?

Seems to happen with a few contacts or a lot of contacts I don't think the size of list matters. If you redo them they seem to disappear a few days later every time.

I have the same problem as well.  Everything was going right (had been forwarding documents or email to some of my groups) and BANG... they magically suddenly disappeared.  Have we found an answer to this problem yet?

I did what someone else did... the day after it occured.  I simply took a few recent emails I had sent (in both French and English) and copied the list of recepients (which appear in my BCC ... that's how I send notes to groups) from my copies in my Sent folder... and pasted the results of the Copy in news groups (which I gave the names of the old ones).  Problem solved in terms of my use of groups... but obviously, this is a major problem for Microsoft to resolve for the whole community.

I did the same once, and after some days, the group dissapear again. Today i did it again

I hope it does not dissappear again

Somebody know how many contact i can have in a group ?

I have the same problem as well.  Everything was going right (had been forwarding documents or email to some of my groups) and BANG... they magically suddenly disappeared.  Have we found an answer to this problem yet?

I did what someone else did... the day after it occured.  I simply took a few recent emails I had sent (in both French and English) and copied the list of recepients (which appear in my BCC ... that's how I send notes to groups) from my copies in my Sent folder... and pasted the results of the Copy in news groups (which I gave the names of the old ones).  Problem solved in terms of my use of groups... but obviously, this is a major problem for Microsoft to resolve for the whole community.

Well, after 4 days, still no sign of the new "preview" appearance in outlook.com mail. I'd hoped the "upgrade" would start to implement by now.

Disappointing that nobody from Microsoft has contributed anything to this thread of late. We can only assume that a) there has been a stuff-up and b) nobody wants to take responsibility for it and admit there is a problem.

In the meantime, while I have been awaiting the upgrade, I have had to use a couple of my groups, and have restored them in the following way:

1. Find an email sent from outlook.com mail to the members of the group, and open it.
2. Expand the list of recipients (in my case, typically in BCC because I respect the privacy of my contacts) [BTW this is why I have to do this in outlook.com mail, because Sent emails in Office Outlook 2016 and earlier don't retain recipients in the BCC line. Thankfully, I occasionally have used outlook.com email to send to my groups when I'm away from home]
3. Highlight and copy the entire list of names for the group [in one case, the same email went to the members of 2 groups, and happily, the names were still in the order they came from each group]
4. Open People in outlook.com and at top near + sign start a new group. I make sure the name isn't quite the same as the missing group, in case the promised resurrection DOES occur.
5. Paste the entire list of recipients into the "Add Member" box. Now, be patient. While the whole lot may appear with extra-large icons on that page straight away, it can take some time (hours?) for the process to complete at server end, so it's a good idea to note down how many members it says straight away, and compare again later before trying to send an email to the group.

The thing about this restoration process is that it confirms that the loss of the groups was a glitch, and while the glitching was still happening, it was not possible to restore the groups. Now, days later, re-created groups are stable and persistent. Oh Microsoft! Talk to us!