The attched patch introduces an email.mailto.enabled param. If set to 1 <email> elements are turned into links in the fo output so that they are clickable and bring up the default mail client.
If you want I can also attach a patch to introduce the same param for html (though it should default to 1 in that case to retain backward compatibility).
patch implementing the above
now with docs
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File Added: mailto.patch
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The patch with docs was applied to svn. Bug fixed.