The "Preview" option in the receipt email designer doesn't really show you anything more than what you can see when designing/editing.
We should be able to preview receipt emails for actual constituents, with merge fields updated, like when running a mail merge in MS Word and other programs. Donors shouldn't be the first ones seeing what's going out!
I would actually love this feature to be available for communication emails as well.
Merge with: Gift receipting in web view - Allow draft emails to be sent to a user for testing/preview purposes