Odd Happenings in Email

2 strange things. I'm using Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows XP.

1. All attachments I'm receiving are in an unrecognizable format even though I know what they are. The only way I can view them is by saving them by adding the extension at the end if I know what kind of file it's supposed to be. ie. "attachment.word" and then it turns into a word document. How can I fix this so it arrives correctly and will open immediately?

2. I'm receiving doubles (sometimes triples) of all of my email.

These things have been happening for the past 2 weeks and I keep hoping they'll go away as mysteriously as they came. Any advice? Thanks so much, Stephanie

 

When you first noticed these things happening dod you change any settings?

What account are you using? It may be the servers fault.

 

So I re-entered my account settings and for some reason, that seemed to take care of the doubling and tripling of my emails for the time being.

My server has been really messed up lately. I have Road Runner (pop-server) in Manhattan and it's consistently slow, or times out on me. This has been for about a week. Maybe it coincides?

Another thought, could the attachments not be recognizable because they are from Mac users and I"m PC??

 

Had to get this back into the loop. The attachments that are unrecognizable are definitely from Mac users (and I'm PC). Is there anyway to have the attachments from MAC users come ready to open in a recognizable file type? Right now, it makes you choose which to open (and often I dont' know what kind of file it's supposed to be) or it opens as code.

Any advice is appreciated. No settings have been changed to my knowledge.