I've solved this myself; my solution is documented below. 1. For unlimited re-attempts at delivering the message, I used the ActivationConfigProperty annotations to set the "useDLQ" property of the MDB activation to "false". 2. For delayed re-attempts, configure the queue as an MBean explicity with RedeliveryDelay set to the number of milliseconds (minimum) between successive delivery attempts at the same message. This is a PER-MESSAGE delay; four messages being redelivered will cause delivery attempts to arrive 4x as fast. This was acceptable for my use case. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4066391#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...