> de-queing, checking a stored timestamp then re-enqueing if the time hasn't passed yet That sounds reasonable to me. Any condition that means you can't proces

> de-queing, checking a stored timestamp then re-enqueing if the time hasn't passed yet That sounds reasonable to me. Any condition that means you can't process that yet, just re-queue it for later. Let the Queue be a dumb single purpose component and do what it does best. If you are upset about making the business logic more complicated: The thing that does this check could be middleware so that your application code can not be concerned with it. For the philosophy see: http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ > "cat isn't for printing files with line numbers, it isn't for compressing multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at non-printing ASCII characters, it's for concatenating files." So you could argue "queue isn't for scheduling messages, it isn't for X.. Y.. Z.., it's for managing a queue of things"