I think you will need to select and copy the contents of the Word document when you have it open in Word, and then paste them into the body of the email that you are composing in Thunderbird. Mail programs generally can't scoop the contents of a document out automatically for you.

I suggest composing a message to yourself, pasting the document contents into the body, and then seeing how it looks when you receive it. Likely it will need some cleanup, since Word's HTML has numerous nonstandard features.

The problem is it won't copy and paste the header or the picture on the page. It only copy and pastes the text below header then spreads the text out so it disappears off the sides of the page??

You can not use a word document as a message body. Nor as you have found is word very good at converting itself to HTML so it can be pasted into a mail message. Partially this is because HTML uses separate files for images and text. so in your example your trying to paste three different things in one go and it is not working. From what you are saying I assume your also using page headers and footers. These are not understood by HTML at all. Those with familiarity with cascading style sheets can create analogous things, but as email is all on a single page they have no purpose. They are printing features. Used in producing paper documents, the purpose for which word exists.

Basically your best approach would be to create a PDF file from the word document and send it as an attachment. Contrary to popular belief, that word document my not look anything like it does to you on another computer. How good or bad it looks depends entirely on your choices of fonts..

Dear Matt, My problem is I'm sending a partial manuscript to literary agents and they refuse to open attachments. Is there any other way to do it??

you might try saving the word document as HTML, then opening the HTML document in your web browser and copy and paste from there..

\I am not sure the result will be satisfactory, but it takes word out of the equation.

Dear Matt, Thank you. I'll try that ;)