Maybe this is why Gmail remains in perpetual beta; the labs team can keep adding useful functionality without having to announce version 1.7, 2.5, 3.0…

Google has been rolling out new features for Gmail at a furious pace lately, with something new popping up almost once per week. This week’s gem? Instant e-mail-to-document conversion.

Software engineer Jeremie Lenfant-Engelmann explains, “More than once, I’ve had a conversation over e-mail and later realized that the information contained in the messages would make a great starting point for a document. So I built an experimental feature for Gmail Labs that does just that: with one simple click, ‘Create a document’ converts an e-mail into a Google Docs document. No more copying and pasting the text from your e-mail — just open the message you wish to convert, click the ‘Create a document’ link on the right side of the page, and voila, you have a brand new document which you can then modify and share!”

I enabled the feature this morning and tested it out. It works perfectly. The document is created in a manner similar to when you choose to save an e-mail attachment as a document. It takes perhaps three seconds, depending on the size of the e-mail and what it contains. This works with simple text e-mails as well as HTML e-mails. (Source-InformationWeek)

This is especially useful for bloggers. I often get thought-provoking emails that I want to use to form the basis for a post. Being able to put them into document format, I can create my post right in Google Docs then transfer it into my blog.

Can you suggest other uses for this new ability?