AbiWord ambush on my mac

Mail attachments arrive as AbiWord documents on my Mac - why?

Every so often - maybe 2 times out of twenty - an email attachment sent
to me as a Microsoft Word document arrives saying it's an AbiWord
document. These have always been multi-page MS Word documents, with no
graphics but with formatting a little more elaborate than simple text.
I have had this happen both with documents sent from Macs and documents
sent from PCs.

AbiWord has its charms, but in these cases it's less than charming: it
becomes very balky and slow and takes several minutes to allow
scrolling, for instance. It underlines phrases in green for reasons
that escape me, and it displays the spinning beach ball of death at
every opportunity.

I don't want my email program to toss these attachments to AbiWord, and
I don't know why it does this. I can't find a menu in preferences
anywhere that allows me to control this. At the same time, I don't
want simply to delete AbiWord in case it's opening files that I'd
otherwise be unable to open. Also it's a nice app if it would just
mind its own business.

Explanations, help, and work-arounds would all be very welcome.

Macintosh Powerbook G4
AbiWord 2.4.1
OSX 10.3.9
Mac Mail 1.3.11

In the latest case, the document was sent from a PC running Word for
Office 2000. When I did a "save as" on the opened attachment, it
proposed saving the document in a new folder (!) labelled
"filename.mimeattach" buried deep in my
library>mail>POPaccount>INBOX.mbox, where it would sit in the INBOX
package.

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Received on Thu Feb 1 04:08:11 2007