Don't use captcha images?

[Tonearm]

I currently use captcha images to validate the customer inquiry form, and I read in another thread that this is not ideal because of accessibility and "it annoys the user". How bad is this considered these days? I also provide a mailto: link on the same page.

[maximillianos]

I've given up on sites that have difficult captchas after trying 2-3 times unsuccessfully to read the garbled text. I find them quite annoying, particularly since I am a developer myself and know of other ways to avoid spam problems. (ie - ajax, etc)

[janharders]

I personally only bother to decipher captchas if I really want to use whatever function they unlock.

mailto:-links, while positive, are becoming less important these days because quite a few people don't use actual email clients anymore and rely completely on webmail - which does, without plugins, not work with mailto:-links.