Rabbitmq messages not dead-lettered per policy

Question

My setup is as follows:

• fanout dl exchange (DLX) => dl quorum queue (DLQ)
• direct exchange (MainX) => quorum queue (MainQ) & routing_key =>
  policy => {x-dead-letter-exchange: DLX, x-overflow: reject-publish-dlx, x-max-length: 10}
• 1 Consumer client bound to MainX/MainQ
• 1 Consumer client bound to DLX/DLQ
• 1 publisher pushing thousands of messages within seconds to DLQ

Based on the policy, the queue shouldn't hold more than 10 messages and any messages above the length limit should be dropped and dead-lettered into DLX. However the policy seems to be ignored because not a single message gets into the DLQ. The same thing happens when I use message-ttl or max-length-bytes

I've tried to manually publish a message to the DLQ and it was successfully received and consumed.

I'm hoping someone has run into a similar issue or can tell if I'm doing something wrong based on the above.

Answer 1

I've figured out the issue and it was due to how I had created MainQ originally. I Recreated it with the correct configuration and started receiving messages.