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What Is Dead Letter Routing?

Dead letter routing sends a message to a dedicated dead letter queue after it exceeds a retry or age threshold during processing. This isolates poison messages that would otherwise block or endlessly retry on the primary queue. Operators can later inspect, fix, and replay the captured messages.

Why it matters

A single unprocessable message can stall a queue or burn resources in an infinite retry loop. Routing it aside keeps the main pipeline flowing while preserving the failed message for diagnosis.

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