Grassroots Response to .doc E-mail Attachments?

LurkingAbout asks: "Maybe it's just me, but it feels like people are sending Word .doc files as attachments more then ever. Typically it's a friendly acquaintance who doesn't realize that .doc is one of Microsoft's ploys to force the few remaining holdouts, like me, to shell out for a copy of Word (or better yet Office). This morning it was the director of my daughter's preschool with the monthly parent newsletter. I've taken to responding with a polite-but-educational message requesting that the sender save the file as RTF or HTML and resend. If I'm feeling long winded I sometimes go into a diatribe about the Evil Empire. Today I started thinking that maybe there's an opportunity for some grassroots organization here. Maybe a concise well-written boilerplate paragraph for just this situation? Or a link to a web page to help educate the masses who think .doc is like air. What do other Slashdot readers do in this situation?"

Comments

Send as MS Works documents.

[jptechnical]

Then you can be sure noone can open it!

Re:It's easy to make them paranoid about using DOC

[passthecrackpipe]

"I typed 1234 into vi, but when I used read() to get the first integer from the file, it came out 808530483. What happened?"

Eh, yeah. What did happen? You got me in suspense now. Don't leave me hanging on like this.