[rabbitmq-discuss] Message expiration

Thu Aug 13 18:43:28 BST 2009

I seem to recall reading once that RabbitMQ doesn't support message
expiration. My apologies if this has been covered before, but I'm
curious as to the status of this behavior.

In reading the 0.8 spec, I'm a bit perplexed that the basic class has
an 'expiration' property, but makes no other reference to it. Of
course, in 0.10, messages have a 'ttl' and the spec has something to
say about (e.g. dead lettering, etc.)

Assuming rabbitmq doesn't discard expired messages and that the
application has the responsibility to check for expired messages
itself, is there any word on what the 'expiration' string value should
be (e.g. a string value timestamp, iso-8601 format, etc.)? Or is this
value simply treated as a pass-through and the producer/consumer chain
needs to coordinate on the format?

Garrett