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 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 AWS 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 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. 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=