Some very good reasons not to use Word and send people Word attachments. It would be nice that people start realising that:

1. Not everyone has MS Office and/or cares about it
2. Word and such aren't free [lots of people use illegal copies, causing them to think they can get MS Office for nothing, which technically just isn't true]
3. Every new version of Word is *not* compatible with its predecessors. This forces people to upgrade to that new "really cool and updated" Office version
4. Lots of those attachments could have been send as plain text [saving lots of space, and better searchable] or PDF
5. An office suite that *is* free and even Free can be found and downloaded legally here [OpenOffice.org]

Taking into account that OpenOffice.org is even better compatible with the various versions of Word documents than Word itself [I've saved other people's documents various times when Word did crash hard on its own document], it can actually create document larger than 80 pages with illustrations etc without giving one problem [try that with Word] and actually behaves when adding those illustrations and other normal markup to your content, one could wonder why people still use that expensive and huge piece of software.