title: "Scheduled tasks"

---

# Scheduled Tasks (Cron)

Cron is the Gateway's built-in scheduler. It persists jobs, wakes the agent at the right time, and can deliver output back to a chat channel or webhook endpoint.

## Quick start

title: "BlueBubbles"

---

# BlueBubbles (macOS REST)

Status: bundled plugin that talks to the BlueBubbles macOS server over HTTP. **Recommended for iMessage integration** due to its richer API and easier setup compared to the legacy imsg channel.

## Bundled plugin

title: "Group messages"

---

# Group messages (WhatsApp web channel)

Goal: let Clawd sit in WhatsApp groups, wake up only when pinged, and keep that thread separate from the personal DM session.

Note: `agents.list[].groupChat.mentionPatterns` is now used by Telegram/Discord/Slack/iMessage as well; this doc focuses on WhatsApp-specific behavior. For multi-agent setups, set `agents.list[].groupChat.mentionPatterns` per agent (or use `messages.groupChat.mentionPatterns` as a global fallback).

title: "iMessage"

---

# iMessage (legacy: imsg)

<Warning>

For new iMessage deployments, use <a href="/channels/bluebubbles">BlueBubbles</a>.

title: "Signal"

---

# Signal (signal-cli)

Status: external CLI integration. Gateway talks to `signal-cli` over HTTP JSON-RPC + SSE.

## Prerequisites

title: "Zalo"

---

# Zalo (Bot API)

Status: experimental. DMs are supported. The [Capabilities](#capabilities) section below reflects current Marketplace-bot behavior.

## Bundled plugin

title: "Zalo personal"

---

# Zalo Personal (unofficial)

Status: experimental. This integration automates a **personal Zalo account** via native `zca-js` inside OpenClaw.

> **Warning:** This is an unofficial integration and may result in account suspension/ban. Use at your own risk.

title: "Agent loop"

---

# Agent Loop (OpenClaw)

An agentic loop is the full “real” run of an agent: intake → context assembly → model inference →

tool execution → streaming replies → persistence. It’s the authoritative path that turns a message

into actions and a final reply, while keeping session state consistent.

title: "Command queue"

---

# Command Queue (2026-01-16)

We serialize inbound auto-reply runs (all channels) through a tiny in-process queue to prevent multiple agent runs from colliding, while still allowing safe parallelism across sessions.

## Why

title: "Authentication"

---

# Authentication (Model Providers)

<Note>

This page covers **model provider** authentication (API keys, OAuth, Claude CLI reuse, and Anthropic setup-token). For **gateway connection** authentication (token, password, trusted-proxy), see [Configuration](/gateway/configuration) and [Trusted Proxy Auth](/gateway/trusted-proxy-auth).

</Note>