Suppose we want to configure an address so that its messages never expire, despite whatever timeToLive was set by their producer.

From the docs, an expiry time of 0 means to never expire, so setting max-expiry-delay to 0 should be sufficient. But this has no effect. Neither does also setting it along with min-expiry-delay to 0.

A hacky way to do this is set the address's expiryAddress to itself, but I can only assume this would have a performance hit if the broker needs to reprocess many of the messages every expiration.

The simplest way is to simply set the min-expiry-delay to a very large number, perhaps the max signed long value. But it would be more elegant for max-expiry-delay of 0 to have the same behavior as an incoming message with an expiry of 0.

To reproduce this, use the existing examples/features/standard/expiry project and add max-expiry-delay as 0 to the exampleQueue address setting and remove the <expiry-address> tag for good measure, e.g.:

<address-settings>
   <address-setting match="exampleQueue">
      <max-expiry-delay>0</max-expiry-delay>
   </address-setting>
</address-settings>

We expect the message to remain in exampleQueue but instead it has expired.

Sent message to exampleQueue: this is a text message
Sleep a little bit to let the message expire...
Received message from exampleQueue: null

no-expiry.zip

I tested this in both the latest AMQ 7.12.3 release and community Artemis 2.38.0.