Users may arrange to have deliveries from jobs under their account placed on a queue from which they can be retrieved via this call. This may be appropriate for collecting documents such as inbound faxes or reports where the documents being delivered do not actually originate from the user, but are part of jobs belonging to the user.

Once the documents for delivery item have been retrieved, the delivery is not considered complete until that item has been "released" by a call to the QueuedDocumentRelease function. This two-step process ensures that the user has successfully received the document.

QueuedDocumentRetrieve may have some advantages over the alternative polling method using the JobList and JobDocumentTransmit functions. Proper use of QueuedDocumentRetrieve and QueuedDocumentRelease will ensure that concurrent client applications do not retrieve duplicate documents, and will allow subsequent processing on the EasyLink switch (including document purge) to proceed as soon as possible.

Applications that use QueuedDocumentRetrieve are likely to simply loop, polling to see if there are any documents available. If a document is returned, then the application might release it (using QueuedDocumentRelease) and immediately issue another QueuedDocumentRetrieve request to see if there is another document waiting, and repeat that process until no document is returned. When no document is returned, well-behaved user applications should wait for a reasonable interval before checking again.

The QueuedDocumentRelease call for a document is expected to be received soon after the QueuedDocumentRetrieve call that retrieved it. If the document is not released, it will eventually be returned to the queue to be available for retrieval again. The default for this "hold" period is 5 minutes. A custom hold period may be specified in the QueuedDocumentRetrieveRequest.

Document deliveries via this queue may also be subject to cancellation operations and job expiration.

Documents may not be returned in the precise order in which they became available for delivery, due to the possibility of unacknowledged retrievals and the possibility of deliveries from multiple independent switches.