That seems like a rather uncommon definition of processing. Certainly not what people mean when they generally talk about processing a message. You’re right th

That seems like a rather uncommon definition of processing. Certainly not what people mean when they generally talk about processing a message. You’re right that if the business-processing is a long heavy-weight operation then that should be decoupled from the message queue and failure handled internally, in which case your definition does make sense as an intermediary hand-off step. Just in the general case, I think most people wouldn’t consider hand-off alone as processing.