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

Of course, if you DO need to go back through and pick out random people from your entire contact list, you can still do as follows:

go into People in Office Outlook,

change the view to List,

click to start a new contact group

Name it

Click to add members

Choose "from Outlook contacts"

Hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard, and click on the various members you want to add

Then click on the "Members" button at bottom of the Add Members dialog and the selected contacts will be added, as many as you clicked, instead of having to do them one at a time.

Thank you for your reply and assistance. The account I refer to is still in the old format - I have another account in the new format for the same organization as it was easier to have a second account. I will try what you suggest but that will only work in a few cases where I know who belongs to what group, for example, the current committee, or printmaking groups by their title. Also many people belong to more than one group and that is not always clear without looking at notes. My other fear is that if I change it all now and then I am migrated to the new outlook I will have to do it all again.

To top it off we are currently running our biennial festival with 250 new artist contacts from around the world submitting works for an major exhibition, plus 20 other events........

I understand the frustration. If you have no means of recovering particular groups from the To: line of a previously sent email, it is a very time-consuming process. I'm reasonably satisfied, though, that my current setup, with the "new" outlook.com and Office 2016 (either the subscription or full version will behave the same), once refreshed in Office Outlook per my post of 9th April above, is stable.

If you are migrated to the new version of outlook.com, and using Office Outlook 2016, you can

Find an old email to the group (should be in your sent items in Office Outlook even if sent from outlook.com)

Select all the recipients (hint - I found this easier if I did a "reply to all" which made it easier  CtrlA-CtrlC to copy the whole group)

go into People in Office Outlook,

change the view to List,

click to start a new contact group

Name it

Click to add members

Choose "from Outlook contacts"

Click at the bottom next to where it says "Members" and paste the whole lot in one go

Save and close

and hey presto, you have the new group with the desired members, which should appear somewhere in the list view in bold, with the 2 people icon.

(I practised this a couple of times with just a few of my contacts to make sure it worked)

After a short time, the new group should replicate to your outlook.com and Windows Phone etc.

Hope that helps!

Thank you for the reply. That's all well and good but when is this nightmare likely to end? If I re assign everyone to their groups again for a community group with well over 600 accounts, how do I know if this will happen for a third and fourth et al times. I do not want to change emails because that is another huge amount of my valuable time wasted.

I'd suggest that while Gmail might cover your basic needs, and certainly integrates well with Android phones, that even though there have been glitches in Microsoft's migration process, the end result of full integration with Microsoft Office, and the flexibilities it gives (especially for those who use all 3 - Windows Phone, Outlook.com web access AND Microsoft Office) is worth considering.

Of course, if you are using Google apps, why would you bother with Outlook.com? But in my opinion, the finished and integrated product (especially as a Windows Phone user) is an excellent way to manage contacts and groups across those 3 areas, and I extensively use Microsoft Office, so why wouldn't I want a robust and unifiedcontact manager as part of that. I love having people's phone numbers, email details and addresses at my fingertips wherever I am.

But having lost groups myself in the leadup to the rollover to new outlook.com and wasted a good deal of time cross-checking the restored ones, I still find it very annoying that Microsoft has allowed this to happen.