A client marks a message as persistent if it feels that the application will have problems if the message is lost in transit. A client marks a message as non-persistent if an occasional lost message is tolerable. Clients use delivery mode to tell a JMS provider how to balance message transport reliability with throughput.

Delivery mode covers only the transport of the message to its destination. Retention of a message at the destination until its receipt is acknowledged is not guaranteed by a PERSISTENT delivery mode. Clients should assume that message retention policies are set administratively. Message retention policy governs the reliability of message delivery from destination to message consumer. For example, if a client's message storage space is exhausted, some messages may be dropped in accordance with a site-specific message retention policy.

A message is guaranteed to be delivered once and only once by a JMS provider if the delivery mode of the message is PERSISTENT and if the destination has a sufficient message retention policy.