Why is the entire address for a mailto link &-encoded?

[Charles-Gagnon]

demo

An e-mail address such as [email protected] is converted into a mailto link such as mailto:test@gmail.com

Is there any documentation about why every character is encoded like this?

[UziTech]

The mangle option is true by default changing it to false will prevent encoding email addresses.

[Charles-Gagnon]

Gotcha, thank you!

Do you have any context on why this would be enabled by default? Is there some potential issue that setting it to false would expose?

[UziTech]

I think it is to prevent bots from crawling a website and spamming the email address. It probably isn't as useful today as when marked was first created since bots are probably smart enough to get the email address anyway. More or less a product of backwards compatibility.