It seems as though you might be describing a process with state stored in an RDBMS or the like. Which, while a perfectly reasonable approach, is not much like the initially-described case of firing a bunch of "send email to foo@example.com"-type messages into a queue, subsequently to be drained and acted upon by possibly-remote workers.
What I am trying to uncover here is how one might expect to use a queue, on its own, to support a very-much-non-idempotent interruptible non-transactional process.
Also, what does it mean to "cancel" an already-sent email?
I have yet to use it, but isn't Java EE's Batch API is used for things like this? It tracks the progress of long running tasks (e.g. the index of the current mail) and can continue from the last sent index in case of some error.
What I am trying to uncover here is how one might expect to use a queue, on its own, to support a very-much-non-idempotent interruptible non-transactional process.
Also, what does it mean to "cancel" an already-sent email?