I have a couple questions regarding the Historic Tasks vs the Historic Activity instances.
First, what is the basic difference between the two?
Second, Is there a way to get specific tasks that normally fall into the Historic Activity (like the mail task) and have them instead drop into the Historic Tasks table?
Historic tasks include user tasks and Historic Activity instances include any activity type like service, script, and user tasks, but also start and end events for example. No it's not possible to change this behaviour.