Telegram channel plugin: inbound MCP notifications not delivered to active session

Description

Inbound Telegram messages received by the official plugin:telegram channel plugin are not delivered to the Claude Code session as <channel> events. Outbound messages (via the reply tool) work correctly.

Environment

• Claude Code version: 2.1.87
• OS: Linux x86_64 (Ubuntu)
• Plugin: plugin:telegram v0.0.4 (from claude-plugins-official)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Configure the Telegram plugin with a valid bot token and allowlisted user
2. Start a Claude Code session (plugin auto-starts via MCP)
3. Send a message from the allowlisted Telegram user to the bot
4. Observe: message never appears as a <channel> event in the session

What happens

• The bot receives the message (confirmed via Telegram getUpdates API returning empty — updates are consumed)
• The gate check passes (gate result: deliver in debug logs)
• mcp.notification({ method: 'notifications/claude/channel', ... }) completes without error ("notification sent successfully")
• The typing indicator fires on Telegram (user sees "typing...")
• But no <channel> tag is injected into the Claude Code conversation

What should happen

The inbound message should appear as a <channel source="telegram" chat_id="..." ...> block in the conversation, allowing Claude to process and respond.

Additional context

• Outbound reply tool works perfectly — messages are delivered to Telegram
• Tested across session restarts (fresh PID, fresh MCP connection)
• Plugin stderr is routed to MCP socket transport (not a file), so no crash/error logs are visible
• The old process (from plugins/marketplaces/...) logged to /tmp/telegram-debug.log and showed successful delivery; the new process (from plugins/cache/...) routes stderr through MCP sockets
• access.json is correctly configured: dmPolicy: "allowlist", user ID in allowFrom

🤖 Generated with Claude Code