I recently upgraded to Mountain Lion OS 10.8.3. After that, I've had innumerable problems with email & none of the documents in Word are openable - a dialog box pops up saying that no Power PC applications are available, or something to that effect.

Office 2004 is not compatible with Lion or Mountain Lion because they don't include the Rosetta software that allowed PPC apps to run on Intel hardware.

Office 2008 was the first version of Office designed to run natively on Intel chips.

Office 2011 is the current version.

You can update to Office 2011, Office 2004 was introduced 9 years ago. You can use other 3rd party softwares, i.e., iWorks, Office Libre, etc., that are capable of handling Office documents.

Or, you can revert back to Snow Leopard.

All in all, this topic has been covered in these forums almost every day since Lion was introduced 2 years ago.

Please search the forums for more info.

Try opening your Word 2004 docs in Apple's Text Edit, with the Preferences first set to Rich Text.

They should open with full formatting intact.

What program do you use to access your Verizon email?

Do you use other PowerPC applications?