Summary

iMessage history injected via dmHistoryLimit is entirely blank for outbound (agent) messages. The gateway reads the text column from chat.db, but macOS writes outbound message content exclusively to the attributedBody column (NSAttributedString blob). This means agents start every new session with zero conversation context.

Steps to reproduce

1. Configure channels.imessage.dmHistoryLimit: 100
2. Exchange messages with an agent via iMessage
3. Restart the gateway (or let compaction create a new session)
4. Agent receives 100 "messages" of history but all outbound messages have null text content

Evidence

Query showing the text column is NULL for all outbound messages while attributedBody contains the actual content:

SELECT date(m.date/1000000000 + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime') as day,
  SUM(CASE WHEN m.text IS NOT NULL AND m.text != '' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) as has_text,
  SUM(CASE WHEN (m.text IS NULL OR m.text = '') AND m.attributedBody IS NOT NULL THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) as only_attributed
FROM message m JOIN chat_message_join cmj ON m.ROWID=cmj.message_id
JOIN chat c ON cmj.chat_id=c.ROWID
WHERE m.is_from_me=1
GROUP BY day ORDER BY day DESC LIMIT 10;

Result: 0 messages have text, 100% are attributedBody only. This has been the case for all of April 2026.

The imsg history CLI command CAN decode attributedBody and displays the text correctly. But the gateway history injection path appears to read text directly from the database, bypassing imsg's decoding.

Expected behavior

History injection should use imsg rpc or imsg history to retrieve message text (which properly decodes attributedBody) rather than reading the text column directly from chat.db.

Actual behavior

Agents receive history entries with null/blank text for all outbound messages on new sessions. They have no conversation context and appear to have amnesia.

Environment

• OpenClaw: 2026.4.22 (also reproduced on 2026.4.24)
• imsg: 0.5.0 (Homebrew)
• macOS: Sequoia 15.x (Apple Silicon)
• Node: 24
• Channel: imessage (imsg bridge, not BlueBubbles)

Workaround

Agent can manually query chat.db via exec to read attributedBody and decode the NSAttributedString blob, but this defeats the purpose of dmHistoryLimit.