Progressive de-featuring of electronic messages

A computer program product for use in a computer system with a message processor, the computer program product for implementing a method of reprocessing a message from which a portion has been removed after an attempt to previously process the message failed, the computer program product comprising one or more computer storage media having stored thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the computer system to perform the following:

• receive a first message that is intended for a particular recipient, wherein the computer system is configured to process messages and log state information to identify each message and the state of the processing of each message in a log, such that upon attempting to process a message, the computer system logs a first indication along with an identifier of the message to indicate that the computer system is attempting to process the message, and upon successfully processing the message, the computer system logs a second indication along with the identifier of the message to indicate that the computer system successfully processed the message;
• attempt to process the first message in order to deliver the first message to the recipient, wherein upon attempting to process the first message, the computer system logs the first indication corresponding to the first message;
• subsequent to logging the first indication corresponding to the first message, fail to process the message such that the computer system does not log the second indication corresponding to the first message;
• access the log and identifying, based on the absence of the second indication, that the message previously failed to process;
• and
• repeatedly attempt to reprocess the first message by first removing a portion of the first message and then attempting to reprocess the first message such that at each attempt to reprocess the first message, a different portion of the first message is removed prior to reprocessing the first message, such that the first message is repeatedly reprocessed until it is successfully processed or until a predefined point at which it is determined that the first message should be deleted rather than reprocessed.