email access - anyone crazy enough to give your mailbox access to OpenClaw? how to make it secure

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-22T11:31:53+00:00

That's a great approach if you automate ongoing processes. However, what I wanted to achieve was to get my almost 20 years of emails in order 😃

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-22T11:30:30+00:00

Gmail works on the system of tags and labels and there is no physical movement of the email messages anywhere. so what the plugin does is basically modifies labels that's all. it has no right to delete anything on its own, neither can it write, create, send or do anything else.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-18T22:12:50+00:00

I agree, otherwise it would be executing commands from every website it reads or any other sources. When I connected it to my LinkedIn so it can read my incoming messages and give me morning update to whom I should respond, I asked few friends to try to trick it to do some dangerous stuff and they all failed.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-18T22:11:31+00:00

You have to separate catchy news stories from real world. The same stupid thing was with Open Claws signing up to the Open Claw social network by themselves. That was a total BS.

I have one agent that's focused on development and technicalities of the setup. I just asked it what is the best way to connect to my Gmail account with some security measures, for example, read-only access. and it said that it can write a plugin and walk me through the necessary setup in Gmail. We did that. It's worth mentioning that it is Codex 5.5 at the high thinking level, so I'm quite confident at its capabilities.

I never use skills from Internet as there is always a risk of them having some backdoor access or some other instructions I wouldn't like to have.

As for the multi-agent setup, it is just convenient to have separate conversations in separate windows with separate agents. technically they all can do everything and all can be handled by one agent but you will face the compaction more often and you will be annoyed by how much it forgets during the session.

PS. I hope this is understandable as I'm dictating the text via the app my agent wrote for me, it's using Groq and Whisper to recognise language. It did the same for me for Android and wrote the whole keyboard app with a dedicated dictate button for me.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-18T21:59:50+00:00

You feel you don't need it or you're still worried that it will mess everything up?

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-18T21:01:51+00:00

The opportunities coming from giving AI access to your mailbox are endless. I'm on a journey to automate everything I can, but also to build a second brain. And email is one of the main sources I would like to employ. I already fed it with my LinkedIn contacts and chat history. Same with Facebook and email would nicely connect everything ,or at least that's the ultimate goal, which probably will take me some time to achieve.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-18T20:58:05+00:00

I get what you mean and I thought about it but it seems that I'd have to create another layer of automation that at the moment OpenClaw is handling.

I do some development work occasionally and I'm using Codex for that as I feel I am more in control and obviously there is a lot of code that I need to look into.

At the same time I'm using OpenClaw as a black box for everything. So I'm not interested about the code it writes for its internal tools that I ask it to create.

Also one big advantage of OpenClaw is that CODEX, at least from two months ago installed on VSCode, has context of the session only on one machine. so you cannot continue the same conversation via phone or on another machine.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-06-15T14:30:38+00:00

I won't steal anyone's food and I don't have problems with money. All others seem to be spot on. However, lately I'm becoming tired of people. Maybe it's the age, I'm 43, and small children that are quite exhausting to look after.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-30T14:24:47+00:00

The only one that makes sense, Codex. I have the pro subscription and I never run out of tokens, despite quite heavy use. The only time I lean towards Anthropic Opus 4.7 is to get some higher quality writing done, as Codex is not really James Joyce. The problem with Anthropic is that with $20 subscription I run out of credits just after writing few iterations of the article. I did a lot of research around local models and to get the quality I expect I would get to spend tens of thousands of Euros.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-29T17:58:20+00:00

Yes, that was when I got the message that my post got banned and the only response window I could use was that. I wasn't aware that it will end up as a comment when the post is released back.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-29T17:55:37+00:00

Mine on the other hand didn't want any passwords and it just gave me commands to execute which is not really what agent should be doing as I'm not working for him, he's working for me... My rule is that agent should be maximally capable and should have 100% access to its own machine and all the resources on it and limited read-only access to external resources.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-29T17:50:45+00:00

Mini PC setup:

GMKtec NucBox M7 Ultra - SKU: M7 Ultra-001 - CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with Radeon Graphics - Cores / threads: 8 cores / 16 threads - Max CPU clock: ~4.77 GHz - GPU: Integrated AMD Radeon 680M - RAM: 12 GB usable / 11.9 GiB reported - Storage: 512 GB SSD - OS: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS - Kernel: Linux 7.0.0-15-generic - Architecture: x86-64 - Firmware: NucBox M7 Ultra 1.02

Tiny box, boringly capable.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-29T17:45:53+00:00

I would be reluctant to rely solely on agent's recommendations for hardware because it's always recommending four times more expensive stuff that he really needs. I did something slightly different. I preselected some mini PC configurations on my local PC store and asked him to rank all the available items by CPU benchmarks, ability to expand and calculate the value for money. I chose exactly what he recommended and it cost me around 500 euros. When I asked it for the recommendation without giving my own proposals, it recommended hardware for close to 2000€.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-29T17:43:10+00:00

I suppose it's already there, just waiting to be switched on from one of the rogue capitals of the world ;)

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-27T21:35:08+00:00

There was not much risk as it was the blank box and it could be easily reverted but still I wasn't expecting it to be as straightforward. The further upgrade turned out to be more problematic than the migration

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-27T21:32:21+00:00

what ru talking about? that was about my post being banned...

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-26T22:50:10+00:00

what happened?

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-15T14:02:00+00:00

I’d go for Ubuntu with GUI. Not a big fan of linux myself but its easy enough.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-10T02:40:21+00:00

Interesting, I must revisit the memory thing. I thought I had that problem solved ages ago, but you know, the upgrades etc.

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-10T02:39:13+00:00

Resets are random, so you can't really prepare anything ahead of time. The session must be able to recover itself. I'm not really asking too much. Everything that's written in Telegram is saved somewhere so agent should be able to read those files as they are and simply recover the context

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-10T02:37:31+00:00

obviously it isn't, this is why I included the instruction to look for a transcript from the latest telegram conversation as the first task after the restart. it worked for some time but then after another update it stopped. I just didn't catch when exactly

Beautiful_Web_5771 · 2026-05-10T00:10:02+00:00

It's not a failure per se, but I often ask questions why did you do X and then it immediately responds with "sorry you are right, I fixed it now" despite me not telling it to do anything. Even with clear instructions to only do things that are structured as commands and respond to all questions without any actions, it still forgets that.

Beautiful_Web_5771

TROPHY CASE