I also had the issue that GetSQS was not preserving any of my message attributes. Looks like the problem is that the initial message request needs to specify which message attributes to retrieve, or "All" for all of them: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25107605/amazon-sqs-java-sdk-cannot-receive-message-attributes The processor source code is specifying "All" for standard attributes, but not custom message attributes, so I don't think message.getMessageAttributes will ever grab anything. ... View more