openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix iMessage replays old DMs from iCloud sync as new inbound messages — missing since-rowid cursor on session init [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

When the iMessage monitor starts (gateway restart, imsg RPC reconnect, or new session), old messages from the chat.db that were synced via iCloud get streamed as new inbound messages. This causes the agent to respond to conversations from months or years ago as if they were just received.

Reproduction

1. Mac Mini signed into a family iCloud account ([email protected]) with iCloud Messages sync enabled
2. chat.db contains ~63,000 messages across 141 contacts and 98 conversations (including messages from spouse, siblings, etc.)
3. Gateway restarts or imsg RPC reconnects
4. Old messages (some from 2024) appear as new inbound messages with was_mentioned: true metadata
5. Agent responds to these old messages as if they were live DMs from the allowlisted sender

Observed Behavior

Three old messages were replayed as new inbound:

These were messages from other people to the user, not from the allowlisted sender. But because they appeared in chat.db with was_mentioned: true, the bridge treated them as new inbound from +15166590526.

Additionally, garbled/corrupted messages were sent outbound on 2025-04-25 — likely related to the same root cause (stale DB entries being replayed).

Root Cause

The imsg CLI supports --since-rowid for resuming from a specific point:

imsg watch --since-rowid <value>   start watching after this rowid

However, the iMessage monitor's watch.subscribe call does not pass a rowid cursor:

attemptSubscriptionId = (await attemptClient.request("watch.subscribe", { attachments: includeAttachments }, { timeoutMs: probeTimeoutMs }))?.subscription ?? null;
// No sinceRowid passed

This is the same root cause as #1647 (closed without fix) and related to #61445 (echo loop on restart).

When iCloud sync writes/updates old messages in chat.db, those changes trigger the imsg watch stream, and without a rowid fence, they flow in as "new" messages.

Impact

• Privacy concern: Messages from non-allowlisted contacts (spouse, siblings, etc.) get processed by the agent and can appear in session context
• Confusion: Agent responds to old messages, user receives replies that make no sense
• Trust: User sees responses referencing conversations they never had with the agent
• Garbled output: Stale DB entries can cause corrupted outbound messages

Suggested Fix

1. Persist the last processed rowid to disk (e.g., ~/.openclaw/state/imessage-cursor-{accountId}.json)
2. On watch.subscribe, pass sinceRowid from the persisted cursor
3. On first startup (no cursor exists), record max(rowid) from chat.db and skip all messages with rowid <= startup_max_rowid
4. Update the cursor after each successfully processed inbound message

This is essentially the "Option 1 — Startup rowid fence" from #61445, applied to the DM/inbound path as well as the echo path.

Workaround

Setting dmHistoryLimit: 0 in the iMessage channel config does NOT prevent this — that config controls group chat context, not inbound replay filtering.

The only current workaround is to sign the Mac out of iCloud Messages or use a separate Apple ID that doesn't sync historical messages.

Environment

• OpenClaw: 2026.4.21
• macOS: Darwin 25.4.0 (arm64), Mac Mini M4
• imsg: 0.5.0
• Node: v24.14.1
• iCloud account: family account with iCloud Messages sync enabled (~63K messages in chat.db)