If you have ordinary text to send in e-mail, please send it inline as plain text.

There are at least three good reasons not to send ordinary text as a Word attachment:

1. That makes it an attachment, which will cause the clueful reader to go into paranoia mode, checking for yet another Sircam-like virus.
2. That makes it a Word document which will cause the clueful reader to go into paranoia mode, checking for yet another Melissa-like virus.
3. That renders the e-mail as a whole no longer platform-independent or vendor-neutral.

The Internet e-mail standards (e.g., ASCII, SMTP, DNS (think about it)) are all fully specified standards, developed in the open by consensus-building, publicly accountable standards bodies (The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology for ASCII, the Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Architecture Board for SMTP and DNS). Implementations for these standards are available on a dizzying variety of platforms. For instance, I have machines automatically send ASCII e-mail to my cell phone using SMTP.

Microsoft Word, on the other hand, is a proprietary, incompletely specified, constantly changing format that everyone else has to try to reverse engineer. It is not a standard interchange format and should not be used in e-mail without a prior understanding with each recipient.

Please, folks "Save As ... text" and include the text inline, if you're going to e-mail. It will make the Internet a better place.