If your OpenClaw agent checks an email inbox every 5 minutes, you’re probably paying for idle paranoia.

That’s not a theoretical complaint. In an r/openclaw thread about triggering jobs from email, one user described an MS365 setup like this:

"At the moment, I have Openclaw job where agent checks its ms365 mailbox every 5 minutes... Wasted calls to LLM (nearly 500 calls to LLM per day)"

That is such a painfully real failure mode.

The demo works. The cron job looks harmless. Then a month later your agent is re-checking old mail, occasionally double-processing messages, and quietly spending model calls on nothing.

If you’re building always-on agents, this is exactly the kind of bug that turns “cool automation” into “why is this thing flaky and expensive?”

The pattern everyone starts with

Usually it looks like this:

Connect OpenClaw to a mailbox

Poll every 5 minutes with IMAP or Microsoft Graph

If there’s a new message, send it to GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, or whatever model you’re using

Try not to…