Summary

Severe iMessage delivery bug: assistant internal metadata and control outputs are being echoed back as inbound user messages, creating recursive message amplification and queue overflow.

Observed symptom examples in user-visible traffic:

• NO_REPLY ... +#+#+#+#+#+assistant to=final ...
• long repeated self-echo chains containing internal assistant markers

This turned routine silent acknowledgements into hundreds of reflected messages.

Impact

• User iMessage chat gets flooded with spammy echoed content
• Recursive loop can trigger queue overflow (Dropped messages due to cap)
• Internal/implementation markers leak into user channel (privacy/integrity risk)

Repro pattern (high confidence)

1. iMessage channel active.
2. Assistant sends NO_REPLY (or short auto reply) on periodic jobs.
3. Delivery path reflects assistant output (including internal metadata markers) back as inbound content.
4. Agent processes reflected content, emits another NO_REPLY.
5. Loop repeats and escalates.

Expected

• Assistant-internal markers (e.g., assistant to=final, reasoning/meta wrappers) must never be delivered to user channels.
• Outbound assistant messages should not be re-ingested as new inbound user messages in the same chat.
• NO_REPLY should be consumed internally, not mirrored back.

Actual

• Internal markers appear in iMessage chat.
• Messages are reflected into inbound queue, causing self-echo recursion.

Temporary mitigations used

• Paused user-facing announce cron jobs to reduce blast radius.
• Continued core monitoring manually while incident active.

Environment

• macOS host (OpenClaw latest stable around 2026-03-03)
• iMessage channel
• Gateway loopback setup

Requested fixes

1. Strict sanitization at channel boundary: strip assistant-internal/meta fields before transport.
2. Add anti-reflection guard (do not ingest assistant-originated outbound payloads as inbound user messages).
3. Treat NO_REPLY as terminal internal signal only.
4. Add loop protection/rate limit for identical self-echo patterns.
5. Add telemetry marker for reflected-message detection.