[rabbitmq-discuss] Read now ack later, much later -- maybe after program restart

[Lowell.Boggs at emc.com]

What happens to messages in durable queues which have already been _read_ but which have not yet been _acked_ when:

1.  rabbit is shutdown gracefully?
2.  the consumer channel closes abruptly -- say from crash, kill, or forced shutdown?

The rabbitmq documentation gives me the impression that I can read messages from a durable queue and choose not to ack them until I  want -- perhaps hours later.  Obviously, I have to watch my queue sizes in this situation.  But what happens if the application never acks the messages before it terminates?  What will happen when the rabbitmq-server is restarted or when or the program is restarted, will it get the messages again?

Suppose I have multiple consumers reading from the same durable queue in a round robin fashion (read ahead is 1) and one consumer has read but not acked 10 messages.  If it dies, or at least closes the connection abruptly, will those 10 messages be sent to the other consumers to read?

Thanks,
   Lowell