PT Booking Email Investigation — Findings

Follow-up on popit3/pt-email-investigation. Short version: David Lloyd does send PT confirmation emails, and the parser already handled them correctly — they were just being deliberately excluded from tracking. Fixed.

Does a PT booking email exist?

Yes. Found 2 in the current ~~/.email3.mail.gdbm window (8090 emails scanned, 171 David Lloyd-related, 2 PT):

Subject: "Personal Training Session Booking Confirmation" From: David Lloyd Clubs <noreply@mybookings.davidlloyd.co.uk>

HTML structure

Simple flat label/value table (no class-grid), 6 rows: Booking Reference, Payment reference, Club, Trainer, Date, Time. Only a single time is given — no end time. Otherwise structurally identical in style to class-booking emails (same <b>Label:</b> / value <td> pattern).

Was a parser needed?

No — turned out this was already solved. dl_email.parse_david_lloyd_email_part() already recognises FT- booking references (BOOKING_REF_RE matches both DL- and FT-), already maps the "Trainer" label to coach (via the existing coach/instructor/trainer label alias list), and already falls back to activity="Personal Training" when a trainer field exists with no explicit class name. This was built and tested on 2026-06-21/25 — there's a fixture (tests/fixtures/dl_pt_session.eml) and a test that already documented (correctly) that PT sessions parse fine.

The only thing stopping PT sessions being tracked was an explicit skip in process_dl_mails():

if bo[booking_reference].upper().startswith('FT-'):
    print(f'PT session (not tracked): ...')
    continue

Note: popit3/todo (updated 2026-07-08) and the investigation task note (created 2026-07-14) both described this as "unknown format" / needing investigation, which was already stale by the time they were written — the fixture predates both by 2+ weeks. Worth being aware that project todo notes can drift out of sync with the actual repo state.

Changes made

MyDavidLloydSchedule.py:

tests/test_dl_email_parsing.py: renamed test_pt_session_not_stored → test_pt_session_parses_correctly and updated its docstring (the old name/docstring asserted the now-changed exclusion behaviour). Added a coach-not-None assertion. All 5 DL email tests pass; the 4 pre-existing failures elsewhere (jobserve/CSV/XML) are unrelated and already documented in popit3/test-failures.

Known limitation

PT emails give only a start time, no end time. dl_email.py's existing fallback applies a 45-minute default duration when no end time is present — same behaviour as any other single-time booking. If actual PT session length differs, calendar events will be the wrong length; not fixed here since it's pre-existing generic behaviour, not PT-specific.

Methodology note

First pass at the GDBM scan wrongly returned 0 results for everything, including known class-booking emails — the investigation note's script assumed values were JSON-wrapped ({"size":..., "mail":...}, per a stale comment in popit3.py). Actual values in ~/.email3.mail.gdbm are raw RFC822 email bytes directly (with a UTF-8 BOM prefix), no JSON wrapper. Fixed by reading with email.message_from_bytes() directly on the raw gdbm value.

Not done

Have not run process_dl_mails() end-to-end against these real emails (would touch live Google Calendar / WebDAV / notes). The next real popit3 run that processes new mail will pick up any new PT confirmations under the new code path; existing ones already in the DB (UIDL 182893, 182702) won't retroactively appear unless reprocessed, since aox() tracks processed message IDs per booking reference.

created 2026-07-15