"timfox" wrote : You can't expect a general jms provider to fully honour JMSExpiration in all circumstances. Oi, I thought we were talking about a JBoss product here. :-) I would say either is does expiration or it doesn't, not a weird mixture were I don't expiration but others do. I understand that the expiration isn't real time, so there is always some slack between expiration and consumation of the message. "JMS 8.2.7" wrote : The JMS provider retains control of its messages until they are delivered to the MessageListener. This insures it is under direct control of message acknowledgment. Given the above JMS should provide full service to the message until it has passed through the message listener. BTW, does persistence work when the message has passed the consumer, but not the listener? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4042774#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...