A poison message, for the uninformed, is a “queued” message that can’t be processed for one technical reason or another.  Doesn’t sound like much of a bother, but due to the way that queues operate, they can muck up the works if left unhandled.

Azure WebJobs does a decent job of handling poison messages out of the box. Basically, you’re given five tries (by default) to process a given message.  If, for instance, the database you’re trying to write to is unreachable or maybe the instructions embodied in an message were somehow malformed then the message would be automagically moved to a “poison” queue for further processing; but only after five failed attempts.  As to any further handling, it’d be up to you.

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