Systems and methods for determining an overall message status in a message processing system having distributed message processing components. If there are no active status providers, the overall message status remains equal to an old status. If there is only one active status provider, an intermediate calculated status is equal to a message status of the active status provider. If there are more than one active status providers, an intermediate calculated status is equal to a highest priority message status among the active status providers. If there are one or more active status providers, the overall message status remains equal to the old overall message status if the old overall message status is a designated final status and if the old overall message status has a higher priority than that of the intermediate calculated status Otherwise, the overall message status is set equal to the intermediate calculated status.