Disable email checking by default?

[mre]

Most link checkers don't support checking email addresses.
On top of that, it can be hard to decide what a proper email address looks like. E.g. [email protected] would be a false-positive, which could be a valid email address.

We should consider disabling email checks by default, deprecating the --exclude-mail flag and adding an --include-mail flag instead. Alternatively we disable it in the Github action.

[lebensterben]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

this feature sounds scary when I first saw it.

[polarathene]

I was surprised to see email addresses being checked by default (but I have noticed the opt-out option for this type documented). I would assume it's rare that users want those checked (especially when not mailto: values), and opt-in would make more sense?

I plan to use lychee with docs for a mail-server product, and one of the inputs had quote wrapped example addresses. lychee was capturing these as '[email protected] (including the left quote, but ignoring the right-side one).

[mre]

Yeah, excluding it by default is probably the way to go. At least I lean towards that at the moment.

[thomas-zahner]

@mre This seems to be the default behaviour since 04887ee
I think we should either close this issue or reuse (and rename) it for removing the now deprecated option --exclude-mail.

[mre]

Yes, let's close it. Can you create a separate issue for the deprecation? Easier to keep track of it this way.

[thomas-zahner]

Created: #1669