Looking at the the HFS files has just been a huge waste of time for me. However, I might simply be looking in the wrong places.
Testing has led me to the conclusion that using send_mail sends the mail by express, meaning we may not have to worry about that particular parameter. I have gleaned one piece of information from the HFS files: the error we're getting trying to use this thing is INVALIDMAILTYPE (more specifically, GAMEUI_HEROES_MAILSENT_DESC_INVALIDMAILTYPE). This is simply jargon to me and is meaningless, but maybe someone else knows what to do. The same error (I think?) is reproducible by sending mail with no item and COD above 0.