A transport-neutral in-order delivery in a distributed environment is provided. Typically, in-order delivery guarantees that sequential orders received by a transport engine are sent out in the same order they are received. Such delivery may be forwarded either to another transport engine or to some application. In case there is a failure of delivery of messages in a stream, the messages are either resubmitted, suspended, or moved to backup. A user or administrator can configure the desired action. Additionally, any stream can be manually aborted or a specified port can be unenlisted. Deliverable streams of messages are locked on to a back-end transport engines or applications and dequeued sequentially unless one of the above mentioned failure scenarios occurs.