Run a sales-email triage agent on OpenClaw for 30 days and plan for the five things that break: memory bloat, silent crashes, captcha stalls, model drift and daylight-saving schedules
A founder of an agent-hosting company describes a single OpenClaw agent on a small server that triaged sales email for a month, with a day-by-day account of what failed and how each problem was fixed.
Evidence: The author reports this. We have not checked it beyond reading the source.
The business problem
A small business wants inbound sales email sorted and answered quickly, but an unattended agent can fail quietly and run up costs.
What was tried
A scheduled job starts the agent every 15 minutes. It triages sales emails, drafts replies, files them into folders, and alerts Slack about anything unusual, keeping its state in a local database. The fixes after each failure: a nightly step that summarises memory older than 48 hours so the context stops growing; a liveness file with an external alert when it goes stale, plus a service that restarts on failure with a memory cap; a hard time limit and a content check on any browser step so a captcha cannot stall it; logging a hash of each prompt and reply so a silent change of model shows up in weekly numbers; and testing schedules with a fake clock before shipping across time changes.
What was reported (mixed)
The agent was still running at day 30 and needed little attention most weeks, which the author treats as the real success measure. Per-run cost tripled by day 4 from memory growth and was lower than on day 1 after compaction. A schedule error meant zero runs for 18 hours, and the catch-up run used about 92,000 tokens.
Limitations
Written by the founder of a managed agent-hosting service who promotes it and argues managed hosting helps non-developers. The article does not say which model ran in production, gives no figures on how many emails were handled well or badly, and the 'provider drift' on day 18 is the author's suspicion, not a confirmed cause. The silent failures it describes (a killed process, a captcha stall, a missed schedule) went unnoticed for hours or days.
What you need
A small server, OpenClaw, a model account, email and Slack access, and the habit of monitoring token cost, memory use and whether the job actually ran.
Sources
- DEV Community (Tijo Gaucher, founder of RapidClaw) ↗ Vendor case study, published April 30, 2026
Source published: April 30, 2026. Last reviewed here: October 14, 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
Tools in this workflow
- Slack: Receives alerts about unusual emailsTry Slack
- OpenClaw: Runs the email triage agent on a scheduleTry OpenClaw
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