Fussy macs?

Another interesting wee glitch involving Mac apps. My pal Di and I write church reports for the local paper. Because we try to make them different from the average church report, we tend to concoct them on one of our wet walks or while recovering from same over a cuppa. She then mails them as an attachment to my Powerbook for me to forward to the paper. All very straightforward.

Well no, actually. Di uses Mail on her mac powerbook; I gave that up after the demise of my relationship with Demon and now use Googlemail on Firefox. But if I try to open the file - which I know fine well began life as a Word file - it appears as a Quicktime movie which then can't be opened. However, if I open the mail in Safari (and you'll recall I don't do this right now 'cos I can only write lower-case mails on Safari) it opens nae bother.

So, for all my friendly geeks out there: does mac only speak to mac these days?