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What Is a Poison Message?

A poison message is a message that consistently triggers an error when a consumer tries to handle it, so it is never acknowledged and keeps getting redelivered. The repeated failures can waste resources and block other work behind it. Systems usually cap retry attempts and then move it to a dead letter destination.

Why it matters

One malformed or unhandleable message can stall an entire queue if it loops forever. A retry limit plus a dead letter target isolates it so the rest of the messages keep flowing.

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