I've done the same thing as you and managed to delete a Distribution List. I
know just how you feel. However, I have spent, and now discover I have
wasted, perhaps 2 hours putting it right. First I panicked and looked up
Microsoft's help on the net, and among other things discovered your letter.
Then I looked at my Outlook folders and got nowhere for a while, and then
realised I could (and did) retrieve almost all the addresses in the list by
going to the last email I had sent the group, where it was easy to copy all
the addresses back into my Outlook contacts and from there Select the members
into a new DL.
However, I found I could have avoided all this trouble because when I
started to do a new email to the group, and began to type into the address
line the first letters of the group name, the original group came up because
it was cached in the system. So nothing was lost after all.
I have saved all the list as a Word document in the relevant folder under My
Documents, and will now update it regularly, which you can do directly from
Outlook Distrib List (File/Save As). I'm no expert and don't know what Russ
is suggesting as his alternative.
All I haven't discovered yet is the solution to one last problem, though I
can easily get round this by copying the few addresses I don't have into the
new DL. That is, although the DL I want is cached, so not lost, I can't seem
to get it back into my Outlook Address Book. This will not prevent me getting
a much better night's sleep than I thought I would earlier this evening.