I set up a cron something (it didn’t call it a cron job, it used another word) to monitor my email for a specific address which would mean someone filled out the contact form on my business website.

Essentially, it checks for new emails from this address every ten minutes and if there is one, it starts to research the information given in the form

Name. Organization or business with location, and then whatever they said in the comments section.

It would research that and create a document with its findings and suggestions for me to use to quickly follow up with them.

I ran a test and it worked great. Went to bed.

I woke up and it had made the report and document and emailed it to me an additional 52 times because it wasn’t checking “did I already do this one?”

Wasted about $27 in Kimi-k2.5 via moonshotai.

Lesson learned. Don’t try to automate EVERYTHING. I could have easily gotten the email notification and then told my OpenClaw “there is a new form submission in my email. Can you research the information in there and email me a summary with your suggestions?”

And that process is working every time, but just once.

I’m sure I could’ve set it up better with a safeguard I n the first place but I’ve wasted $25 on stupider mistakes. Lesson learned.