I am a biginner - I just created a form (post) for a web site and everything is working out very well, with the exception that the information is sent to the email as a dat file that can not be open or used . Did I do something wrong? How do I change it so the information shows up as raw text in the email.

Help!

Please see the FAQ entry How do I get form data emailed to me?

You can open the dat file in a text editor. A assume you use mailto? At least with Eudora, this problem occurs if you don't use the enctype attribute or set it to something else than text/plain (but the extension of the attached file is .att).
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/forms/form.html

But see the FAQ Darin linked to for better ways to do this. mailto only works sometimes.

Thank you for your help. I figured just as much (I'm not a programmer - I'm just a designer and I've been pulling hairs ever since I started this nightmare)

Ohhhh, poor hair, they are innocent, aren't they?

Always remember Murphy's Law: When something can go wrong, it will. When it happens and you can do nothing about it, just pull yourself off the computer and go take a walk outside......