openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Cron announce delivery silently fails for Telegram DM targets (v2026.5.4 regression)

Description

Cron jobs with delivery: { mode: "announce", channel: "telegram" } to DM targets silently fail on v2026.5.4. The cron completes successfully, reports delivered: true with fallbackUsed: true, but the message never arrives in the Telegram DM.

Symptoms

• Cron jobs run successfully, show delivered: true and deliveryStatus: delivered in run history
• Messages never actually arrive in Telegram DM
• fallbackUsed: true appears on all affected runs
• Group delivery with topic IDs (e.g. -100XXXXXXXX:topic:YYYY) works perfectly
• Only DM targets (bare numeric IDs like 5274503488) are affected
• The message tool called from isolated sessions also returns ok: true with a valid messageId but the message doesn't reach the user

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create an isolated cron job with announce delivery to a Telegram DM:

{
  "sessionTarget": "isolated",
  "delivery": { "mode": "announce", "channel": "telegram", "to": "5274503488" },
  "payload": { "kind": "agentTurn", "message": "Send a test message" }
}

1. Trigger the job manually or wait for scheduled run
2. Run history shows delivered: true but message never arrives

Expected Behavior

Announce delivery should send the cron job result to the configured Telegram DM.

Workaround

Set delivery.mode: "none" and instruct the agent to use the message(action=send) tool directly in the payload:

{
  "delivery": { "mode": "none" },
  "payload": {
    "kind": "agentTurn",
    "message": "... ABSOLUT WICHTIG: Nutze das message(action=send) Tool mit channel=telegram und target=5274503488 ..."
  }
}

This bypasses the broken delivery system and works reliably.

Related Issues

• #25670 — Cron announce delivery broken since 2026.2.22 (similar symptoms, possibly same root cause)
• #14937 / PR #14937 — resolve cron delivery target for Telegram channels (fix was merged but may have regressed)
• #14743 — Cron Announce Delivery to Telegram Silently Fails

Environment

• OpenClaw: v2026.5.4
• Platform: Linux x86_64 (Ubuntu 24.04)
• Node: v24.15.0
• Channel: Telegram
• Model: xiaomi/mimo-v2.5-pro

Additional Context

• Group delivery (with topic IDs) is unaffected — only DM targets fail
• The issue appears to be in the target normalization for bare numeric DM IDs
• The telegram:" prefix (e.g. telegram:5274503488) did NOT fix the issue
• Setting sessionTarget: "current" (instead of isolated) also did not resolve it
• Only the message tool workaround (agent sends directly) works