Why won't Mozilla Thunderbird open .doc attachment?

Thunderbird woes.

• Thunderbird is messing up my outgoing attachments. Please help. When I send Word attachments (hasn't happened with .ppt or .pdf) the recipient gets a "binary file" attachment they cannot open. When I look at my sent mail, the attachments show as files with no extension and either a blank white square or a picture of a jack in the box (I know, wtf?). I am on a Mac, os 10.5.2, Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 and am IMAP'd to my Gmail account. This is driving me bananas. I read a bunch of threads including http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-POP-and-Forwarding/browse_thread/thread/afbb5dfec3b07e1a and did everything they suggested, to no avail. I can open attachments I receive, although if it's a Word doc, I have to go through the whole song and dance of selecting Microsoft Word from my apps-- the attachment doesn't look like a Word app and T'bird doesn't recognize it as such. The icon is a picture of a jack in the box.

• Answer:

  Thunderbird on the Mac cannot attach Word documents successfully unless they have a suffix. PC users are accustomed to files having a suffix. Word documents on a PC typically have the suffix .doc, as in essay.doc but Mac users often do not use this convention. If you want to send a Word document as an attachment from Thunderbird on a Mac you will first need to rename the file to add to its name a dot followed by doc If you don't include the suffix your recipient's email program will not recognise the document as a Word document, and they will not be able to open it by double-clicking on it. The document should be fine, but it will be harder for your correspondent to access it. The same applies to other types of document: for Excel files you should add the suffix .xls