No, that's not right. You can safely convert your characters in your links to HTML entities, your browser has to recognize it — in fact, in attributes, the ampersand actually has to be encoded, though in many cases, you can get away without it. But hopefully, email harvesters are too stupid to recognize it. For now.

For example, that's what I did in the contact info field this node. If there wasn't a limit on the contact info field on this site, it would have been an actual "mailto" link.

Here's a little snippet to convert the text into numerical entities, ready for pasting into your HTML pages:

print map "&#$_;", unpack "C*", $text;
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