TIFU by giving openclaw my email
So, I gave openclaw a google app password to my email. Then told it to write a script to look at all new incoming emails. So it did just that, except I didnt look at the script it made and 1 day later it has Thirteen Thousand Six Hundred and Sixteen cron jobs LMFAO (13617) Chron jobs.
Lesson from this? Check the scripts your openclaw makes. The craziest part is that this would mean there was almost 14,000 requests to Ollama Deepseek V4 and only 7% usage used. Hell yeah Ollama.
So yeah, what do you guys use to have openclaw check your email. because in the process of writing this i now have 13633 cron jobs. . . I am gonna go turn it off now lmao.
Okay, after 30 minutes of fighting with my UI that kept crashing this is what was the problem
All cleaned up. Here's what was going on:
The script: /root/.openclaw/workspace/scripts/email-watcher.py — a Python IMAP watcher that polled your Gmail every 5 seconds and ran openclaw cron add for every single new unseen email it found. Each email got its own one-shot cron job that would announce to Discord and auto-delete after running.
That's the 13,994 cron jobs. Every spam email, every notification — separate cron entry. 💀
What I did:
- ✅ Found and killed the running script
- ✅ Renamed the script to
.bakso it can't run again - ✅ Stopped and removed the systemd service (
openclaw-email-watcher) - ✅ Disabled all remaining email-notify cron jobs in the config file directly
- ✅ Updated the jobs-state to reflect disabled status
It's completely shut down now. No more cron bomb