Making iMessage Reliable with OpenClaw: 3 Problems and How We Fixed Them

OpenClaw can use iMessage as a communication channel — you text your AI agent, it texts you back. Sounds simple, but running it 24/7 on a Mac mini revealed three reliability issues that took weeks to fully diagnose. Here's what went wrong and how we fixed each one. The Setup OpenClaw's iMessage plugin works by watching ~/Library/Messages/chat.db via filesystem events (FSEvents). When a new message arrives, macOS writes to chat.db , the watcher detects the change, and the gateway processes the message. In theory, this is instant. In practice, it breaks in three distinct ways. Problem 1: Messages Delayed Up to 5 Minutes When Idle Symptom : You send a message, it shows "Delivered" on your phone, but the agent doesn't respond for 3-5 minutes. Then suddenly it processes everything at once. Root Cause : macOS power management coalesces FSEvents for background processes. Even with ProcessType=Interactive in the LaunchAgent plist and caffeinate running, the kernel still batches vnode events on