Poison Message Handling

A practical example

Example: a form vendor pushes an event with an unexpected null in the email field.

After three failed retries, the platform quarantines the message, moves subsequent events through, and notifies the ops channel with the payload attached.

What to evaluate before investing

• Ask whether the platform quarantines unprocessable events automatically or lets them retry indefinitely.
• Confirm quarantine includes the full payload and error detail so you can fix the source, not just the symptom.
• Check whether quarantined events can be corrected and reprocessed, or whether isolation means permanent loss.

Limitations and tradeoffs

Quarantining keeps the pipeline moving but hides a data gap: the quarantined event's information never reaches downstream systems until someone intervenes. Set alerting and review cadence, or quarantines become silent graveyards.