Rendered mail is not source mail

A rendered body is a view. It is not the source email.

Mail tools often keep several versions of the same message: provider id, RFC 5322 or MIME payload, parsed headers, plain text body, HTML body, reader-mode text, snippet, attachments, and export formats. Any one view can fail while another still has the evidence.

The rule: when a message is being used as evidence, keep or recover the most original form available. Prefer raw MIME or the provider payload. Use reader text and snippets for search and triage, not as the archival source.

Mxr case

The 2025/26 SEC Gift Aid receipt pass found donation confirmations with no PDF attachments. mxr attachments list returned an empty list for the checked message, so the absence of a receipt PDF was real for that message.

The body view was different. On 2026-08-12, mxr 0.6.19 still returned the 56-byte placeholder No readable body content was available for this message. for message 68bd1b72-8648-527c-bbfa-8b0da71a5934. SQLite stored that body as text_plain_source = best_effort_summary, while the same row had Gmail provider id 1966c7ef3bafadef, a non-empty snippet, and raw headers declaring Content-Type: multipart/alternative.

The lesson is not "mxr cannot read receipts." The lesson is narrower: a cached reader or export surface can fail while the provider source still contains the evidence. Keep enough identifiers to go back to the source.

The travel closeout found a second failure shape on 2026-09-23. An Avis search result had a current "Welcome home" envelope, but mxr cat returned a 2024 Glasgow QuickPass body and reservation. The mismatch is the observed fact. Its cause is not yet known. A body becomes unsafe as evidence when its date, place, and reference disagree with the envelope.

Practical rule

For receipts, legal records, tax evidence, or audit trails:

• first check whether an attachment exists;
• if not, save the original email or provider payload before generating a PDF;
• treat a reader or export failure as a cache/view failure until the provider source has been checked;
• record enough identifiers to re-fetch the source later.
• compare the subject, date, reference numbers, body, and attachments before treating a consolidated view as one coherent record.

This is the email-specific form of Evidence of Absence and Audit Evidence Is Part of the Fix. When sources disagree, retain the mismatch in a contradiction ledger.