Amazon SQS queue and message identifiers - Amazon Simple Queue Service
Identifiers for Standard and FIFO queuesAdditional identifiers for FIFO queues
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Amazon SQS queue and message identifiers

This section describes the identifiers of standard and FIFO queues. These identifiers can help you find and manipulate specific queues and messages.

Identifiers for Amazon SQS Standard and FIFO queues

For more information about the following identifiers, see the Amazon Simple Queue Service API Reference.

Queue name and URL

When you create a new queue, you must specify a queue name unique for your Amazon account and region. Amazon SQS assigns each queue you create an identifier called a queue URL that includes the queue name and other Amazon SQS components. Whenever you want to perform an action on a queue, you provide its queue URL.

The name of a FIFO queue must end with the .fifo suffix. The suffix counts towards the 80-character queue name quota. To determine whether a queue is FIFO, you can check whether the queue name ends with the suffix.

The following is the queue URL for a queue named MyQueue owned by a user with the AWS account number 123456789012.

https://sqs.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/123456789012/MyQueue

You can retrieve the URL of a queue programmatically by listing your queues and parsing the string that follows the account number. For more information, see ListQueues.

Message ID

Each message receives a system-assigned message ID that Amazon SQS returns to you in the SendMessage response. This identifier is useful for identifying messages. (However, to delete a message you need the message's receipt handle.) The maximum length of a message ID is 100 characters.

Receipt handle

Every time you receive a message from a queue, you receive a receipt handle for that message. This handle is associated with the action of receiving the message, not with the message itself. To delete the message or to change the message visibility, you must provide the receipt handle (not the message ID). Thus, you must always receive a message before you can delete it (you can't put a message into the queue and then recall it). The maximum length of a receipt handle is 1,024 characters.

Important

If you receive a message more than once, each time you receive it, you get a different receipt handle. You must provide the most recently received receipt handle when you request to delete the message (otherwise, the message might not be deleted).

The following is an example of a receipt handle (broken across three lines).

MbZj6wDWli+JvwwJaBV+3dcjk2YW2vA3+STFFljTM8tJJg6HRG6PYSasuWXPJB+Cw
Lj1FjgXUv1uSj1gUPAWV66FU/WeR4mq2OKpEGYWbnLmpRCJVAyeMjeU5ZBdtcQ+QE
auMZc8ZRv37sIW2iJKq3M9MFx1YvV11A2x/KSbkJ0=

Additional identifiers for Amazon SQS FIFO queues

For more information about the following identifiers, see Exactly-once processing and the Amazon Simple Queue Service API Reference.

Message deduplication ID

The token used for deduplication of sent messages. If a message with a particular message deduplication ID is sent successfully, any messages sent with the same message deduplication ID are accepted successfully but aren't delivered during the 5-minute deduplication interval.

Message group ID

The tag that specifies that a message belongs to a specific message group. Messages that belong to the same message group are always processed one by one, in a strict order relative to the message group (however, messages that belong to different message groups might be processed out of order).

Sequence number

The large, non-consecutive number that Amazon SQS assigns to each message.