Security sites are warning web users to beware fake Twitter invites in their email inboxes. The reports, based on an alert on Wednesday from Symantec, say the emailed invites come with a malicious attachment which, if downloaded, harvests email addresses from your computer and copies itself to removable drives and shared folders.

The emails carry the subject line “Your friend invited you to twitter!”, while the sender’s address is spoofed as “invitations@twitter.com”. Unlike a typical Twitter invite, however, the email contains no invitation link: instead it carries the attached file Invitation Card.zip, tempting the receiver to download it. The attachment, of course, contains W32.Ackantta.B@mm – a nasty, email address-harvesting worm.

Read more on this at Mashable.

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?