Want to avoid spammers harvesting your email address on the web? Just feed your email address into the form at:
http://www.converttojpg.com/
(At present, you have to refresh the page sometimes to get the output to show up.) Once the chart produces the picture of your email address (which spam-harvesters would ignore, because it’s a graphic rather than text), just right-click, “Save picture as…” and save it as a graphic on your machine… Then when you publish the item on the web, insert the graphic into the location where you need to feature your email address. This is the new approach we’re taking with Brigada publishing on the web and initial reviews are very positive. Got a better online ‘machine’ to produce these pictures? Just click on “Comments” below this post, and share your treasure! Let everyone in on your favorite find.
OK, I guess I’m a skeptic but I would be afraid that the email address that they convert are being stored and sold? Maybe it’s just me. Sorry if I’m too cynical.
Mr. Leary, you raise a good point. We checked the site for bad reviews and, finding none, examined their privacy policy — which promised complete and total privacy. However, since I guess anyone could lie about such things, we’ll seek out a method using some kind of photo-editing software on a local hard drive, so we don’t have to take the chance. Thanks for the caution…
Doug
I saw this article and had the same concerns. It seemed just to easy for this to be used as a way to collect the very emails we want to protect!
If you have irfanview (freeware), just copy the text, then open irfanview hit paste and save as gif, jpg, etc. It will discard all formatting, though.
If there is a block of text you want to preserve the formatting of, just hit the print screen button on most keyboards, and again, open irfanview and hit paste. Crop to your liking, and save.
Of course, this may work in other graphics programs, but irfanview is particularly fast with very few steps involved.If you are doing a bunch of such conversions, you don’t even need to ask for a new document…just be sure you’ve saved your last one, when you hit paste for the next one, it overrides whatever is there already….
Wow, Kathy. It *is* a great little program. My main question, then, is — how did I miss it all this time. You know, in my foggy memory, I *think* I’ve heard of this program before, now that I think of it… but why didn’t I start using it until now?! I’ll play around with it some. Installed the plug-ins. Tried your technique. I’m converted. It was just as easy… maybe *easier* than using the website I previously mentioned. Thanks!
Doug
OK Kathy! Just used irfanview to prepare the 6/8 edition of Brigada. It worked great. Faster, I believe, than going to a separate web service. Thanks for the tip, Kathy! Next week we’ll highlight it in Brigada!
We’ve used a site in the past that converts an e-mail address to a javascript link. The advantage of this is that it creates a “clickable” link for the reader’s convenience, while still being invisible to e-mail harvesters. I don’t remember the site right now and don’t have time, but I’m sure Google does. I can look it up later. Of course, it still uses a web site, and if you’re afraid of that, then this doesn’t help, but at the time we used this, it had been examined and rated highly by PC magazine (I think PC World) and I know that when we used it, we saw no increase in spam to those addresses.
The loss of a clickable link is a downside, for sure. But it doesn’t appear to be an overwhelming one. People these days seem fairly adept at copying down email addresses then sending an email to them. And the increased trust that a contact person has — knowing that their email address hasn’t been turned over to anyone — seems to be a good payoff for now. But thanks in advance for giving us the option, if you ever happen across the site.
Doug
What fun it was to see my suggestion turn up in Brigada. I’m glowing with pride. :-) –sheepish grin– I tend to celebrate any small thing I can!
ps didn’t know about the plug-ins…I’ll have to check it out!!
What fun it is for us to use a great quality program — that’s really quick on the go, too.
Thanks again for the idea!
Doug
just an update for windows 7 users… the “snipping tool” accomplishes the same thing and makes it even EASIER than irfanview!
LOVE it! And it works much better than screen prints for so many other needs, too!