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Activity list is not showing emails in BusyContacts on macOS Catalina

Apple Mail on macOS 12 and later​

BusyContacts can show Apple Mail activity using BusyContacts Mail Assistant, a Mail extension for macOS 12 and later. Enable capture in BusyContacts > Settings > Integrations > Mail, then enable the extension in Apple Mail. See Apple Mail activity after an update for setup steps, or Adding Mail for capture limits. The extension cannot automatically import your entire mail history.

Older macOS and BusyContacts versions​

macOS Catalina (10.15) restricted the Spotlight access BusyContacts had used to find Apple Mail messages. Older BusyContacts releases provided an Apple Mail plug-in for supported macOS versions from Catalina through Ventura. The last release to include that plug-in was BusyContacts 2025.4.4; it is no longer supported. See the legacy plug-in instructions if you are using that older setup.

The Spotlight troubleshooting below applies only to macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier. For macOS 12 and later, use Mail Assistant as described above.

Alternative Solution

MailMate, a third-party email client, stores its data in a format that BusyContacts can access through Spotlight. If you have MailMate installed (with Spotlight Indexing Enabled), your email activity will continue to appear in BusyContacts.

Legacy Support: For Users on macOS 10.14 Mojave or Below​

If you're on macOS 10.14 or below and cannot see messages and/or emails in the activity list within BusyContacts, a Spotlight re-index may help.

BusyContacts uses macOS Spotlight to find and display your linked email/messages/etc. Here's how to reset this:

  1. Open System Preferences

  2. Click on Spotlight

  3. Click on Search Results and in the list presented, make sure you have checked "Mail & Messages"

  4. Click on the Privacy tab at the top and make sure ~/Library/Messages or ~/Library/Mail aren't excluded from Spotlight searches.

Next, try and rebuild your Spotlight index by doing the following:

  1. Launch the Terminal.app (in /Applications/Utilities).

  2. Paste the following two commands, pressing return after each:

  • mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Mail.mdimporter

  • mdimport -r /System/Library/Spotlight/Chat.mdimporter

  1. Quit Terminal.

  2. Wait several minutes for the spotlight Mail index to be rebuilt.

  3. Quit/relaunch BusyContacts.

If the above does not work, it may be worth rebuilding your entire Spotlight index. This can take several hours at times to finish in the background and you may not immediately see search results.

Please follow these instructions to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

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