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Activity list is not showing emails in BusyContacts on macOS Catalina

Privacy Changes in macOS

Starting with macOS Catalina (10.15), Apple restricted third-party apps from accessing Mail data for privacy reasons.

While BusyContacts 1.6 introduced a Mail Plugin workaround for macOS 10.14, this solution is no longer available. Apple removed Mail Plugin support entirely in macOS Sonoma (14.0) and later versions.

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

email not showing, email activity list, activity list not showing email messages

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